In their meeting today the Technical Board approved three year LTS
qualification for the following flavours, following the Release Team's
recommendations:
Ubuntu Budgie
Ubuntu Kylin
Xubuntu
Lubuntu
Edubuntu
Ubuntu Studio
Ubuntu Cinnamon
We haven't seen LTS requalification requests from Ubuntu MATE nor Ubuntu
Unity, so these will release subject to release team approval, and they
will be non-LTS.
Thank you to all the flavours for your work, and to the release team for
reviewing!
On behalf of the Technical Board,
Robie
As OMG! Ubuntu’s Joey Sneddon notes, they might have forgotten about Kubuntu (he’s expecting Kubuntu 26.04 to be an LTS release, too), but the two flavors that are clearly excluded are Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Unity.
Joey:
Official Ubuntu flavours only provide 3 years of guaranteed support anyway, not the 5 years regular Ubuntu receives (which extends to 10 years with Ubuntu Pro, and up to a further 5 years with ESM from Canonical).
Flavours don’t stop getting updates after those 3 years, though. Nor do their maintainers lose the ability to issue updates.
Similarly, non-LTS flavours in an LTS cycle get the same foundational updates, including hardware enablement (HWE) stacks. They don’t, however, issue point releases that roll those updates, fixes and kernel uplifts in a new ISO at periodic intervals.
But I wonder how much can anything be guaranteed in Ubuntu land. Ubuntu Pro was supposed to extend the guaranteed support for all official flavors from 3 to 10 years, not only the main flavor’s guaranteed support from 5 to 10 years! Of course, as long as the respective flavor is an approved LTS one!
I’m not that sure that so many people at Canonical are really aware that Ubuntu Pro should extend everything to 10 years in an LTS, regardless of the flavor. I couldn’t care less that Liam Proven, despite being an IT veteran, never learns and doesn’t understand how Ubuntu Pro works. But there seems to be some confusion even among the Ubuntu people! (Note: “esm-infra” refers to the security updates provided for packages in main and restricted; “esm-apps” are the security updates provided for universe and multiverse packages. Non-GNOME desktop environments are in universe. Ubuntu Pro extends this support from 5 to 10 years for “esm-infra” and from “best effort by the community” to 10 years for “esm-apps”!)
It was known that Ubuntu Unity, which didn’t even release 25.10, is as good as dead. While I am certainly not a fan of Unity, it should have attracted more developers, as ❶ it was Canonical’s kid and Canonical’s response to GNOME3, and ❷ it’s a closer match to the macOS visual metaphor than GNOME, if we only consider the global menu! But one cannot find common sense in retards.
But the really bad news is that this is the best proof that Ubuntu MATE is undermaintained. It should have been obvious, and I criticized some obvious flaws:
The Disk Mounter Applet is constantly crashing on my flash drives (one in 3-4 times), and not only isn’t anyone fixing this bug, but nobody even reported it!
The way MATE 1.28 has been released made its inclusion in Debian impossible, meaning that Ubuntu was also stuck with 1.26 for almost two years already. (MATE 1.28 entered Debian testing on Oct. 28.)
When Ubuntu MATE’s team can’t be bothered to even want to have the 26.04 release qualify as LTS, how can anyone believe in Ubuntu MATE’s future?
Oh, but there was one more sign that the Ubuntu MATE guys stopped caring about their child.
As I described in A few Ubuntu MATE idiosyncrasies, the “Welcome” screen in the Live session, which in previous versions also included onboarding functions, has changed drastically in 24.04 LTS. And I included screenshots from the “Welcome” tool in Ubuntu MATE 22.04.5: the user had to click on the “Desktop Layout” button to get the last screen, so all seven layouts can be seen.
In Ubuntu MATE 24.04 and newer, there is no onboarding of any kind, no information that the user can change the layout from a predefined set! How would the user know that there is a MATE Tweak tool with nice predefined layouts? Even if the user finds such a tool in the menu, there are no previews of how these layouts look!
The Ubuntu MATE team has just replaced their customized and informative install and post-install tool with the bland installer from Ubuntu’s main flavor, ditching their own good work! Fucking retards.
Did you know how retarded Clem’s Nemo was?
No, you did not.
Cinnamon was supposed to be a better GNOME that isn’t frozen in time like MATE but evolutionary and revolutionary. Mint, too, benefited from a lot of care from Clem and his minions, even if most of the efforts were directed to futile changes in colors or similar failed attempts to beautify both Cinnamon and Mint. But Cinnamon surely is the smartest file manager once we remove Dolphin from the comparison, right?
Cinnamon 6.6 features improved support for keyboard layouts and input methods.
In the past, the keyboard settings and the keyboard applet only handled traditional layouts.
Going forward, traditional layouts and IBus input methods will be presented in the keyboard settings alongside each other, as if they were the same.
In this screenshot you can see a list of two layouts. One is a traditional XKB layout: French accents on a US ANSI layout. The other is actually an IBus input method: Japanese, using the Mozc engine.
Debian Live ISOs first began to include ready-to-use IBus input-method packages for Japanese, meaning ibus-mozc or fcitx-mozc on the Live image, in Debian 12 Live media in mid-2023. (But general support, with packages installable after boot, has existed at least since Debian 10 in mid-2019.)
Linux Mint discovers Japan on the map in December 2025.
New menu
Nope. Skipping. It’s annoying, with 3 levels, each with different icon sizes!
Nemo
Nemo 6.6 features a template manager: … File operations (copying, moving, etc.) can be paused and resumed.
File operations can be paused
Oh my, oh my, oh my! File operations could not be paused and resumed in Nemo prior to version 6.6!
How the fuck was I supposed to know? I’m not a member of Clem’s sect, and I always thought Cinnamon to be a poorly designed desktop environment!
But Thunar already has a Pause/Resume capability in the file copy/move dialog!How come Nemo is so… retarded?!
Nemo was derived from the old Nautilus that’s now Caja (GNOME’s Files is a “castrated” Nautilus). To the point, Nemo is a 2011 fork of Nautilus 3.4, the last “classic” version before GNOME started ripping stuff out (spatial mode, dual panes, tree view, compact list view, etc.). MATE’s Caja branched from the same 3.4 snapshot, so Nemo and Caja are siblings; both kept the feature set that GNOME later dropped. And yet, the only one that until now lacked a Pause/Resume feature was Nemo!
🟢 Caja does have Pause/Resume:
ℹ️ Caja inherited this capability from the GtkFileOperations code present in Nautilus 2.32 (GTK2), which already had Pause/Resume. When the entire MATE was ported to GKT3, this feature was preserved. In contrast, GNOME 3.0 to 3.6 shipped Files with a brand-new, stripped-down progress that only offered Cancel! The Pause/Resume feature was added back only in GNOME 3.8 (March 2013) when the developers wired the existing gio pause logic to a new button!
🔴 Nemo 6.4.5 does not! What’s worse, there is a disabled start/resume button that makes no sense!
🟡 Nemo 6.6 replaced the disabled shit with a pause button:
ℹ️ To avoid porting code from GTK2 to GTK3, Nemo has forked Nautilus from GNOME 3.4 (the first GTK3 cycle), after GNOME had already thrown the old dialog away and replaced it with a minimal shit that only offered Cancel! Users have been asking for the missing button for years, since Issue #1786: Add pause/resume option to copy dialog (Feb. 23, 2018). But Clem’s team only implemented it in 6.6.
🟢 Thunar does have Pause/Resume:
ℹ️ Actually, Thunar got it not that long ago. Pause/Resume was implemented in Thunar 4.15.1, hence in the stable version 4.16 (December 22, 2020), meaning Xubuntu 21.04, Fedora 34, Debian 11. Still, 5 years before Cinnamon’s Nemo!
🤯 How the fuck are people fascinated by Mint and Cinnamon?!
If you need snaps, then you need this
People being sheeple, and snaps most likely becoming unremovable starting with 26.04 (unless Mint makes a miracle), users of any and all Ubuntu flavors and derivatives (such as Linux Lite) will have to live with snaps.
Too bad it has no mechanism to scan all your snaps, nor is there a way to generate and create a list of the snaps you have on your machine. It’s a hand job so far.
He’s wrong. No, package managers aren’t that smart, and I definitely had my time with them. Two documented examples:
When I wrote The Arch way in Manjaro: replacing the kernel under my ass, the story started by showing how pacman is completely stupid in solving package dependencies, and Pamac wasn’t any smarter; but Octopi is much smarter, and it behaved as it should. Therefore, the dependencies were correctly defined within Arch’s architecture, but the solver was retarded in pacman.
In A random discovery about zypper, thanks to rpm and a deb package, I described a flaw in SUSE’s zypper. It had nothing to do with dependencies but with modes, and when zypper forced an installation, it made a directory writable. That’s a security issue, but still, a package manager that failed.
I have the same talent as that guy to find bugs everywhere. However, package managers are mostly OK, at least as far as apt and yum/dnf are concerned.
The guy in question didn’t understand what package management does.
What happened is this (and I just ignored pacman):
It was not a question of package managers not understanding what the correct dependencies were.
It was not a question of package managers installing “recommended” packages as hard dependencies.
It was a question of how the packager has defined the dependencies in a package’s declaration!
To put it simple:
Package A strictly requires package B to work without crashing.
For some features, package A would require package C, but these features aren’t that frequently used, so let’s put package C as “recommended” (soft dependency).
For some other features, package A would require package D, and the packager has decided to declare package D as “dependency” (hard dependency).
So, the “optimal” case would be to only have package B installed in addition to package A. But once package D is pulled in, this one has its own dependencies, which in turn might have their extra dependencies, and it gets to what you could read in the aforementioned article. The unwise decision was with the packager, not with the package manager’s dependency solver!
Even without installing the “recommended” packages, removing Package A will leave “orphans” installed. Overall, though, unless the packager has declared as hard dependencies packages that pull in an excessive amount of large packages, it’s rather normal.
In RPM land, I’ve encountered the opposite scenario, both in Fedora and in EPEL: the packager has forgotten to add some required dependencies, so the rpm installed, but the binary crashed. Go figure. One can’t have the cake and eat it (on ne peut pas avoir le beurre et l’argent du beurre).
Otherwise, there is always room for improvement. Current development for apt is primarily driven by Julian Andres Klode. If you have the brains to understand more about dependency solving, here you have some hard nuts on his blog:
The last one is nice. And no, I don’t know how they do it in dnf or how they were doing it in yum. That is, I couldn’t tell whether apt is smarter than dnf or vice versa.
HAL -December 22nd, 2025 at 8:01 PMnone
Comment author #116350 on Bad news in Ubuntu land, Nemo was retarded, and more by Homo Ludditus
they might have forgotten about Kubuntu (he’s expecting Kubuntu 26.04 to be an LTS release, too)
Hmm, maybe, yes, but it’s not at all certain. It seems a little strange to “forget” a flavor as important as Kubuntu, which is often one of the first, if not the first, that people mention when talking about them.
Well, if the project lead or team doesn’t post any news on the blog or forum, nor respond on the support and dev channels (irc, matrix etc.) and stay silent, it will give the exact same impression.
I feel the Team page accurately reflects the current situation: Ubuntu MATE doesn’t have a formal team anymore, and much of its survival depends on indirect contributions from MATE (upstream), Debian (to package MATE for Ubuntu), Canonical (supporting flavours), and the wider community (testing, bugs, everything else that makes the system work).
Back when I was contributing 5+ years ago, there was more a “team” presence (with quality assurance, ISO testing, bugs reported & fixed, closer collaboration with MATE upstream) but even then, I think we had bottlenecks in communication with our project leader.
To be fair, if Ubuntu MATE was to cease existing as an official flavour, nothing stops someone from building an “Ubuntu MATE Remix” spin (like the 14.10 and 14.04 times). Not sure if (or where) the script to building those ISOs are.
If that happens, then this community could adapt into something else or have a migration path. It’s our (Martin’s) server, so we control the fate to this site. The only thing Canonical can control is the brand name (Ubuntu MATE) or Ubuntu trademark in the event it is no longer an official flavour.
At the moment, there is no cost to hosting this site (it’s sponsored by Bytemark), but that could change if we were to become purely community based or we’d need to downsize… or check with the leader if the Patreon money can cover the costs.
You see, if it was me leading a new distro ‘remix’, I would pick Arch Linux as the base. It’s really easy to build custom ISOs. I also maintain a gtk3-classic package which brings back older GTK behaviours (which is a pain to package for Ubuntu). Plus, if we were snap adverse, then it wouldn’t include them – native packages all the way (Octopi instead of Synaptic)!
I will stick to Debian based distros, Arch would not be a choice for me personally. I did see Parrot (which I have used in the past) has now moved to KDE. I don’t see that as a good omen for Mate. I still have an installation of Sparky Mate on a different laptop. But Mint Mate would seem the likeliest candidate for me if Ubuntu Mate went away. If Mate itself is the problem and goes away, I would have to consider Cinnamon and KDE. I am not a big fan of Xfce.
88 messages in this thread and nothing from Martin. Yes, Mate was originally for his parents, but the continued silence didn’t sit well with me. People are starting to talk about respin. No thanks. An LTS has a certain official and professional blessing with expectations for both the maintainers and the users. The longer I thought about it, the more I disliked it all. We’re not Solus users after-all, are we?
Martin is obviously a big name to us, and we look to him for leadership. Mate is his baby. He has provided the community here and elsewhere a ton of things over the years, not just Mate, and is very likable. I want my gratitude to him and anyone still here or out on Github who has made this flavor viable, and better over the years, transparent.
I actually met Martin at SCALE in Pasadena, CA, years back, along with Popey and even Shuttleworth himself. Exciting times. Even a phone back then.
But the Canonical connection died a long, long time ago but some messaging should have been done here, even if it was: “guys, I’ve moved on, we’re shutting down, please fork it“ or “guys please step up and well get this going again, here’s the emergency checklist” or “guys, the new project will bring a new imagining of Mate.” Haven’t seen such messages?
…
Frankly, I just don’t see really see Mate getting through the X11-to-Wayland transition regardless, until someone else fixes the remaining, big breaking issues and those are hoovered up, if they are. I need remote desktop to work; I don’t care how it does. I need existing workflows to work; I don’t care how under the hood. And I need security and that means LTS.
Mate might come back to life once the heavy lifting is done and everything can be easily automated again as we have seen over the years with a few tweaks here and there, shims and the occasional regression or replacement package. That’s not really a viable model, less so with a single developer.
To be honest, it was this community that really locked me into UM. All of you have been welcoming and helpful and really have helped me embrace linux. I find my self doing things like using cron, writing scripts and I even created a home network. I’m no expert and half the time I still have no idea what a lot of you are talking about, but my point is, it was this community more than it was the distro that made me support UM… for me anyway.
I also think UM missed the boat. With the end of Win 10 support, a lot of linux distros “cashed in” so to speak and UM had an opportunity to showcase itself but was totally silent.
…
Anyway, considering this thread, I am starting to explore different distros. I’ll stick with Ubuntu/Debian based distros and right now I am leaning toward MINT as I would rather use a distro that looks like it will be around for a while and one that has plenty of support. Plus, I am not really a power user so I want something that works as well as provides me a platform to learn and explore. Ironically, the thing holding me back from making the switch is their forums. They are horrible and some of the moderators need to not be moderators.
Here’s hoping UM sticks around and I don’t have to make the jump, and I agree with others, it would be nice if we had some communication from the devs on UM’s future.
Ubuntu MATE… well, we all know. It’s always been a one-man effort. And the man apparently has moved on.
Even Kubuntu is facing some issues, as the main developer has been facing some difficulties both personal and job related (check out her blog for details).
I don’t know about Xubuntu, as I couldn’t find an official blog or some place that reports on details besides the new releases.
But not everything is lost: remember that years ago, Edubuntu was discontinued and a few years later got back to life.
● Jan. 27, jaymo_chicago, the guy who opened this topic:
I’ve been keeping an eye on this thread and it does seem unfortunate that not one word has been provided by a member of the Ubuntu MATE development team.
It is really disappointing.
I have decided to move on to openSUSE Tumbleweed but I enjoy keeping tabs with this wonderful group (and out of interest, how things are developing with this). For me, I have realised the traditional desktop is the most important thing rather than GTK3, and I have found a good home in the LXQt desktop.
What a fuck-up! Ubuntu MATE is dead. MATE is as good as dead. Martin Wimpress (“Wimpy”) is a traitor. And many other Ubuntu flavors aren’t in very good health, apparently.
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Hmm, maybe, yes, but it’s not at all certain. It seems a little strange to “forget” a flavor as important as Kubuntu, which is often one of the first, if not the first, that people mention when talking about them.
Speaking of the future of Ubuntu MATE and of its non-qualification as LTS for 26.04, there is this thread on its forums: The future of Ubuntu MATE?
It was started on Aug. 5, 2025, to ask why MATE 1.28 from 2024 is still unavailable in Debian and Ubuntu.
The non-LTS status started being discussed on Dec. 9.
Here’s why I wanted to mention this forum thread that currently includes 114 contributions:
● Dec. 11, ericmarceau:
● Same day, M.aD:
● Dec. 12, lah7 (moderator):
● Dec. 26, lah7 (moderator):
● Same day, jymm:
● Jan. 1, 2026, clessley, excerpts:
● Jan. 4, GeekBone, excerpts:
● Same day, lah7 (moderator):
● Jan. 7 (fragments), ClaudioDC:
● Jan. 27, jaymo_chicago, the guy who opened this topic:
What a fuck-up! Ubuntu MATE is dead. MATE is as good as dead. Martin Wimpress (“Wimpy”) is a traitor. And many other Ubuntu flavors aren’t in very good health, apparently.