Why didn’t anyone tell me that Ubuntu MATE is already dead?
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
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
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).
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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.
About Ubuntu MATE, maybe some new people will answer the call and get the project back on track. We can always hope.
As for XFCE, let’s hope it doesn’t die out. We need it. We need something light. GNOME is the worst of them all, it seems to me that even KDE is less resource-intensive.
Why, of course, Liam Proven would be devastated if something happened to XFCE!
OTOH, “resources” is more than just RAM. It’s also CPU.
OK, Plasma takes less RAM by itself. I don’t know how much is due to “Qt6 versus GTK4” and how much has to do with the different implementations of Wayland. But why do KDE’s apps tend to crash so often, and why are they prone to create so many unnecessary files?
OK, but on older or very old machines, we need something lighter, which is why we need XFCE.
Not everyone has, or can afford, the latest equipment, or can replace it regularly, or its components…
Mate’s not quite ready for Monty Python’s “bring out yer dead” cart quite yet, lol. The last bug I reported to Debian actually got fixed in 24 hours. It’s still a simple useable system. For the last year or better i’ve been producing an un-official Devuan Mate-mini iso, in fact I just uploaded an experimental version using Xlibre where possible instead of Xorg. It’s just vanilla Devuan with a few bug-fixes and some added firmware using their themes and settings, they don’t don’t produce a live hybrid iso of Mate, so I built one to make it easy for folks to try, and will continue to update it every few months for the foreseeable future. It has gotten quite a few downloads over the last year, so I know there’s still an active base that uses Mate, it’s dependable but not blingy every day driver. Hint: Just turn off compositing, it works sooooo much better without it.
Did you report any bug to Ubuntu MATE that ever got fixed? Ubuntu MATE has an active forum, but that’s about the only active thing there.
MATE in Debian and other distros needs customization. I don’t like the defaults, like, at all.
No I just usually use reportbug and sent it to Debian that way. I agree that MATE needs some customizing, I produced a custom version for a while last year that was pretty nice IMO, but I had to stop as I was trying to do too much at once and got crazy busy. For the Devuan ISO I simply wanted to stick with vanilla Devuan settings and theme as much as possible, I made a couple of tweaks and that’s it, and left the rest up to the user. And again it’s a “mini” with all the infrastructure but no browser or other major programs, I like leaving those choices up to the user as well, since many folks have strong preferences about such things.
UPDATE: Liam Proven knows more about Wimpy’s lack of “passion” towards Ubuntu MATE. In Ubuntu 26.04 beta arrives packing GNOME 50, which no longer supports Google Drive, at the end:
Nøughty Linux = Ubuntu Server + NixOS. How pathetic.