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):
- Bring the system up to date
- Edit sources.list
- Update the repositories
- Remove the upgrade blocking package
- Upgrade packages to the 18.04 versions
- Reboot the Pi
- Fix inconsistencies
- Delete contents of /etc/apt/sources.list.d
- Finish upgrading
- Add three skipped packages
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.
I upgraded from 3b to 3b+ by draging some boot files from rasbian. I also did a firmware upgrade before,
sudo BRANCH=stable rpi-update (its pi 3b+ right now)
and took a whole wack of stuff. I think i took all network drivers (brcmofmac(random numbers).something) and lib files and pasted it into ubuntu. I also took bootcode, and the rpi3b+ file and pasted that before.
K here it is in order:
- sudo BRANCH=stable rpi-update on old pi
- unplug sd card, plug into legit pc and add bootcode and other boot file (rpi3b+ or something) from the rasbian copy if not already there from firmware update
- boot rasbian on old pi and copy lib modules and brcm files onto usb
- boot ubuntu on old pi and paste files in appropriate locations (open folder as admin)
- reboot
- shutdown
- boot on 3b+
- do whatever the heck you need to upgrade to 18.04 (https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=223749 helped me)
Hi. I use Ubuntu MATE on the RPi3. Ubuntu is obviously a popular OS, and therefore will have a lot of users on the Pi. According to this, Ubuntu MATE 16.04 will only be supported for three years. It was released in April 2016, and therefore will end support in April 2019, and that’s only six months away now. Ubuntu MATE 18.04 was released in April, and it really shouldn’t take over six months to create the Pi image for it.
Why are you spamming the same idea over and over again? I’ve told you that we have only one dev on it . With one dev it can take 5 year’s if that dev doesn’t have time for it.
Here’s an update on the Raspberry Pi 18.04 builds. To avoid duplicate topics, let’s stick to one topic.
https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/status-of-ubuntu-mate-18-04-for-raspberry-pi-3-b-b/18054/6?u=lah7