SEP 01 and still no indication there will ever be an 18.04 for the raspberrypi 3B+.
If there are problems, could we hear about them please.
If someone is working on a release please post something.
If it looks to be another month for a release could we please hear about it.
UM was good in that you could run the same software on a desktop or laptop or raspberrypi.
Possibly time to look to other software.
Yeah, I think this project is dead.
I have started preparing PI images based on Ubuntu MATE 18.04.1. I’ve hit more issues than in the past and I have not had as much free time recently which is delaying the release.
I’m going to insert one comment and a related observation about the whole 18.x business:
COMMENT: Anyone who performs a shell login (SSH from elsewhere or <Ctrl><Alt><F1> on the Pi itself) will be greeted by the following:
Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.38-v7+ armv7l)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage
0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.
New release '18.04.1 LTS' available.
Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.
If you run the software updater in the GUI it will also show up there. So there definitely is an image out there. It downloads, etc. So anyone who hasn’t seen this notification has only themselves to blame. But this is where the comment ends…
OBSERVATION: Downloading this image, and running the processor for it only goes so far. It reaches a point where it then says there’s not enough room in /boot. You can make some room by deleting one of two image files (which one depends on the Pi you’re using --this is documented BTW), but it’s not enough; I think it needs another 4K.
If I read things correctly, the extra space is only needed temporarily (for expansion purposes), so I don’t know what the impact would be of moving 4K in overlay files off temporarily. Because I’m a large enough card short, I haven’t tried it (if it blows up, I just reformat the card and try again without actual data loss… LOL)
The other thought I had was to mount a blank SD card via USB adapter, and creating a partition table on it (a larger /boot as FAT32, and the rest as ext4), copying the contents of the system card over, and then swapping cards to try again.
Has anyone managed to do this successfully?
Just curious…
Yes, upgrading from Ubuntu MATE 16.04 to 18.04 on the RPi is possible. You simply modify the sources that Ubuntu MATE downloads packages from, and then upgrade all packages that have a newer version in the bionic repository. Read more about it here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=223749
You don’t seem very far along with this (one commit to the flavour-maker code, and no changes to the ppa) so can I make a request? Ubuntu-mate has undoubtedly been very popular on the pi, but its hybrid nature is very confusing and actually works against getting better support in Ubuntu. There is no reason to use the same kernel as raspbian when Ubuntu builds its own kernel especially for the pi. This works well in armhf and arm64 as I have demonstrated in the xubuntu installers/images I built for 18.04 (AArch64 on Raspberry Pi 2 (rev 1.2), 3B, 3B+ ). These were quick to build because I used the standard Ubuntu build packages/scripts. Why isn’t an official armhf/arm64 ISO produced at the same time as the other architectures? It is certainly do-able, it just needs a motivated person (preferably inside canonical) to bang heads together and make it happen. Please start building Ubuntu-mate like the official server images (using the Linux-raspi2 package).
Please tell me how I can help get Ubuntu Mate 18.04 released for the Raspberry Pi.
How long can you support those for, though? Not every architecture necessarily has long support due to differences in complexity. armhf has not typically had the same support lengths as i386 and amd64 on release manifests. PowerPC has been community-supported without internal support from Canonical.
The bespoke kernel in Raspbian has adaptations that are not necessarily upstreamed to the mainline kernel. Having an Ubuntu userland can prove beneficial alongside it. You could run a stock Debian armhf install but you’ll find performance hits likely due to the mainline kernel being used. I’ll have to run tests after church.
Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi is a labor of love. It isn’t quite dead. If it becomes rebased on Ubuntu Core & entirely snap-based, perhaps fever dreams could come true.
Yes, Linux-raspi2 is in the universe repo, which means package updates are not guaranteed. But it’s maintained by the same people who maintain the normal kernel packages. It’s the same kernel as used in Ubuntu-core. There is no reason to doubt that it will continue to receive security updates. It has the same raspberry patches as the raspbian kernel, so you won’t be seeing any significant drop in performance.
What the past has told us is that it will be the userland that will break first. For example Firefox. Or Ubuntu-mate images broke within the first few weeks (error on upgrade due to lack of boot space). The latter is still not fixed, nearly two years on. This is entirely due to the bespoke Ubuntu-mate raspberry pi setup. If it was structured like a normal install, using packages from the Ubuntu repos, I’m pretty sure a bug like that would have been fixed very quickly. At least you would have had somewhere to go to submit bug reports (launchpad).
Ubuntu on the raspberry pi is certainly not dead. Far from it. Don’t confuse Ubuntu-mate with Ubuntu.
The space problem is a long standing issue (there are dozens of posts mentioning it) - it can be avoided by sudo apt upgrade at the command line.
DO NOT run do-release-upgrade - it will attempt to install the standard boot loader and destroy your Pi image.
When I made my post, I only presented the information I got. But I do thank you for the warning about do-release-upgrade; it’ll definitely help other folks out. 
I did see the what @code_exec said before I tried the workaround I had floated (ie. create a new filesystem with differently sized partitions and copying everything over to it before doing an update).
I’ll just say that I followed the link and upgraded in accordance to its directions. Those directions require considerable manual intervention and are fairly slow, so not exactly painless, but they definitely do the trick (I’m on 18.04 now).
I will recommend them for anyone who wishes to upgrade, but it comes with the warning that it takes a very. long. time: The largest download took two hours and the subsequent install close to four!!! However, there is one portion where you shouldn’t stop between steps (the ones between the separators below):
It’s my opinion that this can be turned into a script by somebody to remove some/all of the pain. Aaaaaanyway…
The only problem I’ve encountered is that after everything is said and done, instead of having 2-channel stereo output, it’s one monophonic channel. I don’t know how to return it to a stereo “state” (that knowledge is beyond my abilities). pacmd returns:
boss@strauss:~$ pacmd list-sinks|grep name
name: <alsa_output.0.analog-mono>
alsa.name = "bcm2835 ALSA"
alsa.subdevice_name = "subdevice #0"
alsa.card_name = "bcm2835 ALSA"
alsa.long_card_name = "bcm2835 ALSA"
device.profile.name = "analog-mono"
alsa.mixer_name = "Broadcom Mixer"
device.icon_name = "audio-card"
I know asking that in here is probably off-topic, but since it does have to do with the upgrade…
I am glad that I was able to help you with my tutorial. Your idea of creating a script for the upgrade is good, and I will work on creating such a script soon.
I have made the script! You can download it from MediaFire
You’ll have to run the script as root, not by putting “sudo” at the front, but by entering the root environment using “sudo -i” and then running the script using “./upgradeubmate.sh”. You CAN use sudo to run the script, but all the output of the script will come out instead of just text saying what the script is doing.
If you get a “Permission Denied” error when attempting to run the script, enter in “chmod +x upgradeubmate.sh” and then try again.
That’s terrific! Here’s hoping it gets the exposure so other folks can upgrade painlessly! 
When the official release of 18.04 gets released on the Pi…
20.04 has been released on other computers!
@penguin_nedyalkov Did you mean “18.04” not “20.04”? Ubuntu 20.04 won’t be released until April 2020! By following the instructions I posted on the RPi forums, you can upgrade Ubuntu MATE 16.04 to 18.04 on the Pi without having to wait for Ubuntu MATE’s developers to release an image.
If you want a faster release please consider contribute with code or with money (so we can have more devs on the pi project). At this time the pi version has only one dev, and that it’s Martin. So in the feature please think and don’t spam on the forum with that kind of attitude.
I’d like to contribute but I am not quit sure how to set up an environment where I can build an arm or arm64 image of Ubuntu MATE 18.04 for the pi. Is there some documentation or a tuto that would put me on the right track to doing that?
At this time we don’t have any documentation of Ubuntu Mate arm version. And personally i really don’t know if there’s one available. Sorry
Martin did a presentation about this - https://ubuntu-pi-flavour-maker.org/about/
If you want to continue using the flavour maker (I’ll repeat I think this is the wrong thing to do), then the necessary bug fixes should be very trivial. The work is in packaging the ppa.
If you want to make an sd card image like the Ubuntu server image, then the livecd-rootfs package is what is used in Ubuntu to build it. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/RaspberryPi#Building_Raspberry_Pi_3_images . Debian have a comprehensive wiki on live build which is very helpful, but it is slightly different in Ubuntu. Some other distros like kde neon have documented this a bit too.