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Hi there 👋,

welcome to my new website, this is my first post here 🎉 - It is about a customized Manjaro MATE ISO I created.

My favorite desktop environment currently is the MATE Desktop, however especially for new users it is not a very user-friendly implementation in most distributions. So I personally always configured the stock MATE experience to make it much more usable and polished. But actually you should not have to do so much to get an acceptable experience out of a desktop environment.

A Distribution doing a great job with their MATE Edition is Ubuntu MATE. I used to run this Distribution but much more prefer Manjaro/ Arch Linux as the backend. That’s why I changed to Manjaro MATE and they’re definitely better than some other Distribution with the MATE Desktop but not quite as good as Ubuntu MATE. So I created a customized Manjaro MATE ISO 🎉 🎊

Features #

Ayatana Indicators #

The most important change of the new Manjaro MATE Spin is the integration of Ayatana Indicators. They describe the project as follows:

Application Indicators are a GNOME implementation of the StatusNotifierItem Specification (SNI) that was originally submitted to freedesktop.org by KDE. The Ayatana Indicator project intends to become the new upstream for application indicators and associated projects with a focus on making Ayatana Indicators a desktop agnostic technology.

They have some great advantages compared to the default MATE Notification Area:

Consistent sharp rendering of status icons
MPRIS-support for controlling media players
Calendar Synchronization with Evolution
Notification manager

Pipewire #

The default sound system included in the ISO is Pipewire

PipeWire is a project that aims to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux. It provides a low-latency, graph based processing engine on top of audio and video devices that can be used to support the use cases currently handled by both pulseaudio and JACK. PipeWire was designed with a powerful security model that makes interacting with audio and video devices from containerized applications easy, with supporting Flatpak applications being the primary goal. Alongside Wayland and Flatpak we expect PipeWire to provide a core building block for the future of Linux application development.
Capture and playback of audio and video with minimal latency.
Real-time Multimedia processing on audio and video.
Multiprocess architecture to let applications share multimedia content.
Seamless support for PulseAudio, JACK, ALSA and GStreamer applications.
Sandboxed applications support. See Flatpak for more info.

To be in full control of your audio streams the minimal patchbay Helvum has been included

Classy curated apps #

The main applications included in the ISO are not surprising but some nice apps were included.

The default Browser is of course Firefox. As a default Office Suite the robust Libre Office is shipped with the beautiful Libreoffice style Yaru icon theme. Coming to Multimedia: Celluloid is the default video player and Rhythmbox as a music player. Celluloid defaults to the classic window border layout and Rhythmbox is pimped with the the Alternative Toolbar Plugin.

To organize your Mails the GTK-based Evolution E-Mail client is shipped, providing integration with the Ayatana Calendar Indicator.

Instead of the rather slow stock MATE search tool, the powerful FSearch is here to let you search for files instantaneously and fast.

For the security of you accounts the password manager Secrets and Seahorse is installed by default.

The default shell is Fish, to make the command line more approachable for new Linux users and more efficient for all users.

MATE Layouts (based on MATE Tweak) lets you quickly switch between different panel layouts to get a user experience similar to Windows, Mac, the old Unity or simply the productive Gnome 2 Layout which is the default one.

App Plugins #

For Caja there is now by default the caja-admin plugin installed. So you can open directories or edit root files as administrator.

Additionally for the text editor Pluma the official MATE package pluma-plugin is now included by default. This transforms Pluma to a usable IDE with some plugins like bracket and word completion, quickhighlight, source-code browser:

Miscellaneous #

Themes #

The default theme is now the slick looking Matcha-dark-pueril theme in a MATE green style, which I helped creating. Especially for this theme I created a custom green styled Papirus Folders for the used Papirus Icon Theme.

For Pluma and the MATE Terminal there is a new elegant and consistent theme: