Powerful Applications
While MATE Desktop provides the essential user interfaces to control and use a computer, Ubuntu MATE adds a collection of additional applications to turn your computer into a truly powerful workstation.
Productivity
Firefox delivers safe, easy web browsing. A familiar user interface, enhanced security features including protection from online identity theft, and integrated search let you get the most out of the web.
Thunderbird is a full-featured email, RSS and newsgroup client that makes emailing safer, faster and easier than ever before. It supports different mail accounts (POP, IMAP, Gmail), has a simple mail account setup wizard, one-click address book, tabbed interface, an integrated learning spam filter, advanced search and indexing capabilities, and offers easy organization of mails with tagging and virtual folders. It also features unrivalled extensibility.
LibreOffice is a full-featured office productivity suite that provides a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft(R) Office; its clean interface and powerful tools let you unleash your creativity and grow your productivity. LibreOffice embeds several applications that make it the most powerful Free & Open Source Office suite on the market: Writer, the word processor, Calc, the spreadsheet application, Impress, the presentation engine, Draw, the drawing and flowcharting application, Base, the database and database frontend, and Math for editing mathematics.
Entertainment
Rhythmbox is a very easy to use music playing and management program which supports a wide range of audio formats (including mp3 and ogg). Originally inspired by Apple's iTunes, the current version also supports Internet Radio, iPod integration and generic portable audio player support, Audio CD burning, Audio CD playback, music sharing, and Podcasts.
Shotwell is a digital photo organizer. It allows you to import photos from disk or camera, organize them in various ways, view them in full-window or fullscreen mode, and export them to share with others. It is able to manage a lot of different image formats, also including raw CR2 files.
VLC is the VideoLAN project's media player. It plays MPEG, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, MOV, WMV, QuickTime, WebM, FLAC, MP3, Ogg/Vorbis files, DVDs, VCDs, podcasts, and multimedia streams from various network sources.
VLC can also be used as a streaming server that duplicates the stream it reads and multicasts them through the network to other clients, or serves them through HTTP.
VLC has support for on-the-fly transcoding of audio and video formats, either for broadcasting purposes or for movie format transformations.
...and a whole lot more
Naturally you'll also find a firewall, backup application, document/photo scanner and printer management all included in Ubuntu MATE. And this is just the start. The Ubuntu Software Centre includes thousands of applications suitable for just about any professional or recreational pursuit.
Games
In the last couple of years Linux has become a first class gaming platform thanks to Valve bringing the Steam platform to Linux. At the time of writing Steam has more than 1000 high quality indie and AAA titles available for Linux. Ubuntu MATE is fully compatible with Steam for Linux.
While Steam is a major step forward for gaming on Linux, there are also many high quality and enjoyable Open Source games titles available for Ubuntu MATE via the Ubuntu Software Centre. It doesn't matter if you like flight simulators, motor racing, first person shooters, jump and run or card games, you'll find something to keep you entertained.
Accessibility
Making an accessible operating system was a key priority when the Ubuntu MATE founders initially set out the goals of the project.
Ubuntu MATE is never going to be able to offer the comprehensive integration of assistive technologies that Sonar GNU/Linux provides. But Ubuntu MATE will continue to follow their lead so that Ubuntu MATE is a viable desktop solution where computer access is shared within a household or business where individual needs differ.
Mobile Integration
Currently Ubuntu MATE has the essential mobile device support you'd expect. You can plug in a phone, media player or digital camera and the device is automatically detected and mounted, you can then access the files on it or sync content.