April 2019 is approaching - what should I/we do with Ubuntu MATE 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)?

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Today is January 27, so April is approaching :slight_smile:

My Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS shows the following output for ubuntu-support-status:

$ ubuntu-support-status 
Support status summary of 'my-hostname':

You have 97 packages (1.9%) supported until April 2021 (Community - 5y)
You have 2714 packages (54.0%) supported until April 2021 (Canonical - 5y)
You have 652 packages (13.0%) supported until April 2019 (Community - 3y)

You have 84 packages (1.7%) that can not/no-longer be downloaded
You have 1477 packages (29.4%) that are unsupported

Run with --show-unsupported, --show-supported or --show-all to see more details

But I don not see any critical components of MATE which are unsupported:

$ ubuntu-support-status --show-unsupported | sed 's/\ /\n/g' | sort -u | grep -E "caja|mate|atril|^eom$|marco|mozo|pluma|plank|tilda"
caja-actions
caja-actions-common
ubuntu-mate-wallpapers-complete
ubuntu-mate-wallpapers-utopic
ubuntu-mate-wallpapers-vivid
ubuntu-mate-wallpapers-wily

My personal decision would be to stay on 16.04 LTS until 2021 because of some problems in 18.04 LTS release:

I hope that all these problems will be fixed in Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS or before.

Should I do anything with my Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS after April?
Do you plan to provide security updates and improvement fixes for 16.04 LTS in MATE for Xenial PPA - ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/xenial-mate?

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I will stay with ubuntu mate 16.04, hope there are no problems.

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I'll be sticking with 16.04 LTS until the very end. It's been rock solid stable for me, and some issues like the missing middle-click drag menu (due to GTK3) in 18.04 are dealbreakers.

Should I do anything with my Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS after April?

You can either continue using 16.04.5 with 55.9% support or upgrade to 18.04 LTS. That figure might change as Ubuntu MATE is using community supported packages.

The good news is the core of the system will still supported by Ubuntu (Canonical) until 2021. It's looking like that MATE 1.12 will become "unsupported" in April 2019 as there hasn't been any SRU updates since around 2017 (see Launchpad for caja, pluma, mate-panel, mate-screensaver). The 1.16 PPA is a backport from around the time of 16.10, which reached end of life.

Since 16.04 is now approaching 3 years old, software will be a inevitably a few versions behind (except if it's from PPAs). So, unless the package is eligible for a SRU (the process for landing updates in LTS releases), it's unlikely we'll see new features or non-critical bug fixes to applications. :slightly_frowning_face:

:ubuntu_mate: Of course, I don't actually package MATE, but I'm not aware of any tasks planned for 16.04.

Do you plan to provide security updates and improvement fixes for 16.04 LTS in MATE for Xenial PPA - ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/xenial-mate?

I can't officially speak for this backport, but I would doubt new packages will be released for 16.04 as MATE 1.16 is the last GTK2 release that is compatible with 16.04. These packages haven't been updated since 2017.

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The Ubuntu 16.04 repositories will receive package updates until April 2026. What the Ubuntu MATE team mean by Xenial being ‘supported until April 2019’ is that after April 2019, no new ISOs for Ubuntu MATE 16.04 will be produced, so if you install Ubuntu MATE 16.04 in, let’s say, 2021, you’ll have quite a lot of packages to update after installation.

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I use 16.04 on a Mac PPC, so I have to stay with 16.04.