It was literally two days ago that I wrote:

I told you that Ubuntu MATE is as good as dead, didn’t I?

It was in the context of Ubuntu MATE not having released a Beta for 26.04 (which won’t have the LTS status for it, anyway) and having stopped building Daily Live ISOs on March 4. And I was linking to a selection of comments taken from a thread started on Aug. 5, 2025 on its forums: The future of Ubuntu MATE?

Well, it was already the Chronicle of a Death Foretold, but unnoticed yet, because very few people still bother to check Ubuntu MATE’s vital signs.

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For the general public, the news was broken by OMG! Ubuntu‘s Joe Sneddon: Ubuntu MATE’s founder is stepping back after 12 years 😱

Wimpy made the announcement on Ubuntu’s Discourse on March 27: Ubuntu MATE – seeking maintainers:

Hey :waving_hand:

I created Ubuntu MATE back in 2014, and my involvement in the project is coming to a close. Perhaps you can help?

As another development cycle passes, I find myself lacking the time I once had to work on Ubuntu MATE. And, to be frank, I don’t have the passion for the project that I once had. When I have time to tinker, my interests are elsewhere.

With that in mind, I’m interested in handing over the reins to contributors who do have the time and energy to work on Ubuntu MATE.

If you are an Ubuntu contributor with experience maintaining packages in the Ubuntu archive and are interested in working on Ubuntu MATE, let me know. I’ve posted a similar message in the Ubuntu Flavours channel on Matrix.

Looking forward to hearing from passionate Ubuntu contributors :love_you_gesture:

It was merged by Lubuntu’s Chris Guiver into a useless Thank You to Martin Wimpress (Ubuntu MATE) thread.

It eventually reached the Ubuntu MATE forums: A message from the leader (Martin Wimpress – a.k.a. Wimpy – Ubuntu MATE co-founder).

🪦

Let’s face it: Ubuntu MATE has long been dead. And MATE per se isn’t in very good shape either. I complained about its lack of direction, lack of management, and lack of communication between the core MATE developers and Debian’s maintainers. That fucking stupid blocker that prevented MATE 1.28 from entering Debian has made impossible the same upgrade for Ubuntu. It was obvious that Ubuntu MATE was like a ship adrift, with a missing skipper and a drunken crew. Somewhere between 22.04 LTS and 24.04 LTS, that passion mentioned by Wimpy was lost and never recovered.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again: there might be a bazillion tiling window managers for autistic, gender-fluid, woke Zalphas; what normal people need is a normal desktop environment, and only two of them have enough manpower to guarantee their future: GNOME and KDE. Of the two, only GNOME has the backing of the industry. KDE is arguably thriving and still the default desktop in openSUSE, EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Nobara, and more, but I am unhappy with the quality of Fedora’s KDE desktop (not just a spin anymore) and of Kubuntu.

XFCE survives as a representative of the KISS spirit, but it’s as incomplete as it was 20 years ago, and with a minimal team only, so it would be a shame if anything happened to it. Cinnamon is a joke and a wasted effort, although, should Thunar die, that would make Nemo the only reasonable alternative to GNOME’s Files (the dumbed-down Nautilus).

With Ubuntu MATE on life support, MATE has absolutely no future whatsoever. It was the only distro that made it look decent, elegant, and professional, and it quite benefited from the Yaru theme. MATE Tweak has great preconfigured alternative layouts only in Ubuntu MATE. Fedora’s MATE spin is an insult to one’s intelligence: only defaults that look dated, Compiz instead of Marco, and the default MATE Tweak configurations lack those created by Ubuntu MATE’s team.

MATE should survive in Mint and Manjaro, the two other distros that bother to provide some consistent theming. But Mint is focused on Cinnamon, and Manjaro is in the middle of a revolution, so it’s really going to die. (By the way, Manjaro’s Führer declared the Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto “the Mutiny on the Bounty.”)

The spirit of GNOME 2 and the spirit of Ubuntu’s romantic beginnings, both represented by MATE in Ubuntu MATE, will soon die. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Maybe it was all Canonical’s fault for having abandoned MATE, which should have remained the default desktop instead of all that nonsense with Unity and all those hesitations. It’s also Canonical’s merit to try to improve GNOME’s usability, which is atrocious with the default layout and with no extension preinstalled. So I guess it’s time to move on.