Is it safe to upgrade from Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS to Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS or should I wait until 16.04.1.
Ubuntu MATE is a great distro but some people on youtube are complaining about bugs and quirks.
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I would certainly wait a few days/weeks so they can get the bugs out of it!.
In my opinion; Ubuntu should not have stuck to their release schedule but should have held back so it could be thoroughly tested, they have shot themselves in the foot and will lose fans because of it!. 
Thanks. Ubuntu MATE is a great distro and I can’t wait to try out 16.04. But I’ll just wait until the bugs get ironed out.
There’s a lot of people asking this question, from my experience I see a lot of people having trouble trying to upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04, there are a few disrtos you will be bypassing and that’s were the trouble come in
I just went from 14.04 to 16.04 with a clean installation and everything went smoothly…
Another question will be how nicely (unofficial) Mate 14.04 will upgrade to the official ubuntu mate release. It could be seamless, or? I would like to hear how it goes.
A big concern right now is AMD video drivers. What are you running?
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I’ve done a UM 16.04 fresh install on one machine with no problems, I’m waiting for 16.04.1 to perform a fresh install on my main PC. IMO if your 14 is running fine wait for 14.04.1, you can always test a live install
I’ve got one computer running AMD and one running NVIDIA
Hi @anon42388993,
I read somewhere on this forum (I think it was a comment from @lah7?) that people should do a clean install and not an upgrade from UM14.04 to UM16.04!. 
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(It probably was me @wolfman.)
Since 14.04 (LTS) and 14.10 (now end of life) were unofficial releases at the time, it would be a good idea to clean install.
Other users may have had success (please share!), or as pointed out by @Robgoss, possibly not. Be prepared to face more problems than it’s worth due to any side effects or missing packages caused by upgrading via this unofficial build.
More importantly, as @anon42388993 suggests, if you have an AMD card, you might hold off entirely until AMD release their new driver.
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I seem to remember that using some proprietary driver was problematic. My HP system has 16.04 installed in a test partition with whatever driver the installer choose which was …
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Caicos [Radeon HD 6450/7450/8450 / R5 230 OEM] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]
Another factor that is related is OpenGL…
OpenGL Renderer Gallium 0.4 on AMD CAICOS (DRM 2.43.0, LLVM 3.8.0)
I’ve not had any issues with my display!
Debian itself is very robust when it comes to dist-upgrades. Why am I telling you this? Because it is the foundation of Ubuntu.
Now I will tell you how I upgraded to 16.04, at least one machine. It is my fiancee’s desktop. When we bought it refurbished some years ago I installed Lubuntu 12.04 on it. Lubuntu was somehow not good enough for her.
Then on top of it I installed the tasksel for the entire Unity desktop and it removed Lubuntu, oh boy was it sluggish. So I decided to finally take Mate as I was already using it on my Debian sid laptop.
She was delighted. I think I even took a PPA for the newest Mate packages at the time.
When 14.04 came out I made a dist-upgrade and till recently it ran perfectly fine.
16.04 came out and I performed a dist-upgrade rather than waiting for the notification for a newer Ubuntu version because I wanted also to clean some cruft in the whole 4 years.
Now she runs Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and it runs splendid, no traces of Lubuntu or Unity can be found.
Ubuntu can be just as robust as Debian proper when you take good care of it. Because the underlying system is just the same. Mate is not a distro, it is only a desktop environment. So I do not see a need for a fresh install. Sure it is easier and faster but if you have everything configured to your liking you probably do not want to start from scratch, especially not on a machine that I do not use personally.
This Dell desktop was bought and only once we installed Ubuntu on it and it still runs the same basic system upgraded in 4 years to the newest release.
Now that turned to quite an anecdote. To answer the question, yes, it is safe to do an upgrade. But always make sure to have backups just in case and ask yourself about the advantages/disadvantages of a fresh install vs dist-upgrade.
One reason I am a Debian user and prefer its derivatives is that no distro can do in place upgrades as good as Debian.