Ubuntu MATE 22.04 Beta Testing!

Development Discussion
#1

No fooling - it's nearly April and almost time for the final release of Ubuntu MATE 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish! And the beta image has blossomed and is ready for community testing. :strawberry: :fish:

Thank you to everyone who has helped us with previous testing for 22.04, including the initial ISOs.
We can't say enough how important the community contributions are during these testing periods. Thank you! :bowing_man: Martin also wants to extend his sincere thanks to everyone who has played an active role in improving Ubuntu MATE for this LTS release :clap: From reporting bugs, submitting translations, providing patches, contributing to crowd funding, developing new features, creating artwork, offering community support, actively testing and providing QA feedback to writing documentation or creating this fabulous website. Thank you! Thank you all for getting out there and making a difference! :green_heart: :raised_hands:**

We're getting together with Ubuntu and the other flavors for another testing week, and as you know, team work makes the dream work! :handshake: :crescent_moon: This testing week is focused on the Beta release on March 31. Final release is three weeks away, on April 21. 22.04 is an LTS release and will be supported for three years.

If you want to share in the excitement on social media, please use the hashtag #UbuntuTestingWeek. Ubuntu and all the flavors are all one community, and if you're able to help out other flavors, it helps all of us make awesome things. :hugs:

And if you've been nervous about testing, now is a great time to ask for help and join in! Chat with other testers on IRC #ubuntu-quality on Libera Chat, on Telegram Ubuntu Testers, or in the #testing-week channel on the Ubuntu Hideout Discord server.. Testing doesn't require any coding knowledge, can take as little as 30 minutes to complete a test case and file a report, and can be done on a VM or bare metal with a spare machine. :blue_book:

Directions and helpful hints are below, and if you have any questions, please reply to this post! :thinking:

ubuntu-flavours

Preliminary Jammy Jellyfish Release Notes

You can find the test ISO here :floppy_disk: :

You can test on either a spare machine or a virtual machine, and please let us know in this thread if you encounter any problems. If at all possible please file Bug reports. The sooner we know about a problem, the sooner we can tackle it! :clock11:

If you’re new to ISO testing, or need a refresher, here’s a quick guide:

First of all, you’ll need a Launchpad/Ubuntu One login. Go here to create one if you haven’t done so already.

You’ll want to download the Impish Indri daily build here: Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) Daily Build

Take a look at the testsuites for Ubuntu MATE, many of which take less than 30 minutes to complete. :clock1030:

Follow the directions in the testsuite. If it does all of those things, great! If it doesn’t, however, we need your help. Click on the link at the top of the page that reads “Report a bug against the contents of this testcase.” Sign in with your Launchpad/Ubuntu One account.

Follow the directions in the bug report, and be as specific as you can! This is a key step - an unreported bug will be an unfixed bug. :bug: :receipt:

We have the preliminary Ubuntu MATE 22.04 Release Notes available at this time.

There have been several updates to Ubuntu MATE packages for release in 22.04 as well as the underlying Ubuntu base packages. There are some major changes coming in this release, in addition we would like some testing focus on:

  • Yaru themes
  • Picom compositor
  • MATE HUD

Early testing and bug reporting will help improve the final release.

Thank you again for testing and for reporting your issues, concerns, observations, and questions in this thread! :green_heart:

You can upgrade to the developmental release using the instructions below. However we encourage testers to try the daily ISOs as much as possible. We recommend anyone who upgrades their system to the developmental version to backup first! :harddrive: If you rely on your system as your daily driver, it might be advisable to wait for the final release.

:stop_sign: Friendly reminder that developmental releases HAVE the possibility of breaking and requiring a reinstall. So please keep that in :brain: should you choose to run it as your daily driver. :stop_sign:

To upgrade, press Alt + F2, and type:

update-manager -cd

If you aren't prompted to upgrade, press Alt + F2 again, then

update-manager

and click Settings and Livepatch. Go to the Updates tab and toggle the option for 'Notify me of a new >Ubuntu version' to 'For any new version.'

Press Alt + F2 again, and then type:

update-manager -cd
9 Likes
#2

Some questions and thoughts:

It doesn’t matter how you like to consume your Linux :penguin: packages, Ubuntu MATE has got you covered with PPA, Snap, AppImage and FlatPak support baked in by default.

What does this mean exactly? I like a daemon that monitors the ~/.local/bin directory and automatically adds AppImages to the menu for me. Is this no longer necessary since everything is now "baked in" the new release?

Also, I hate Snaps. I think I managed to remove them from my system completely but I'm never sure if I quite managed it. Is there a command or an option that can be added in the installer to simply not enable Snaps on the system? If not could one be added?

In the nightly I did my first install with I was unable to change the desktop panels theme from the default to the Traditional panels theme using the Welcome application. I had to change this with the Mate-Tweak application for it to actually take effect.

Did a reinstall with nightly from 4-4-2022 and this did not impact me this time. It appears to be fixed.

I noticed that the Ubuntu-Mono-Dark icons theme did not have icons for either the Indicators or for the Mate-Tweak application. I managed to source those application icons manually in the MenuEditor tool from the hicolor icons directory. Could these icons be added to the Ubuntu-Mono-Dark icons theme so it doesn't break things? I consider this a papercut.

Alternatively, I honestly don't mind the new Yaru Dark theme except for the default desktop icons. If I could change the icons for directories to the ones from Ubuntu-Mono-Dark I would be happy to use that theme instead. I just really do not care for the directories icons. They look wrong to me, flat and out of place. I recognize this may just be a 'me' problem and may not bother anyone else.

I had an issue with the Ayatana Indicators, where the keyboard applet just showed up and I was unable to use the Indicators tool to make it go away again. I finally resorted to using the 'Startup Application Preferences' tool to make it go away.

Additionally there was no way with a GUI to change login wallpaper. I was able to locate the command to edit the text file to the preferred wallpaper and successfully changed it but not being able to do this quickly and easily with an application when it was possible to do it before seems like a regression to me.

Otherwise I've been very happy with this release of the system even in beta. It's been very nice to run.

EDIT: Recent reinstall shows that things have been fixed, have altered that section of this post. Thanks!

1 Like
#3
#4

Thanks for all the informations!
Firefox and Firefox ESR are snaps or debs in navigator selection menu? Very nice idea anyway!

1 Like
#5

Is there a reason why the mate themea are not installed as default?
Well apart from that issue its running great.
What could be a nice feature is firefox as a deb package but that is easy to fix.

#6

the firefox esr package I believe is a .deb

#7

Is there a reason why the mate themea are not installed as default?

You might find this link useful, I know I did. It's less about the why and more about the work-around though.

#8

Hi Guys, installed Ubuntu MATE 22.04 BETA today on my Thinkpad x240 and tomorrow gonna install on my Ryzen 3.

On Thinkpad tested everything I could: Themes, customization, aplications, PPAs, Gaming..... I simply not found a single bug! Nothing to report.
Still testing, using in production, working with it to see day by day what maybe is incomplete or buggy; but until now, nothing to report.

This is going to be one of the most stable releases so far by now, the best one. On Beta and not a single bug, you guys are amazing and doing an amazing work on it.

With it said, thank you for all and grateful for this community!

2 Likes
#9

Anyone tried GIMP on Ubuntu Mate 22.04?

On GIMP version 2.10.30 they changed the Color Picker API, and it seems that MATE needs to get xdg-desktop-portal implemented for it to work. Link of the bug here.

A dev seems to have written an issue on the mate-desktop github page, but I don't know if there has been any progress on that.

So my question for testers is: Does GIMP's color picker work in MATE 22.04?

1 Like
#10

menta themes etc. is dropped too.

Just now with gtk4 around theme support is an outdated feature until some devs cant see the unique design anymore i bet. Technically theming is still possible even with libadwaita.

#11

I updated my original post about it but I also wanted to make a new post to comment on it. Did a reinstall with the nightly for 4-4-2022 and the issue with being unable to set the panels has been fixed for me. I was able to change the default from Familiar to Traditional in both the live environment and in the installed desktop via the welcome center sections intended to handle those.

Thanks!

#12

I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this release. Finally the BlueTooth works properly. The 22.04 looks just spiffy, I haven't noticed any bugs. Finally I can go back from Mint Cinnamon to Ubuntu Mate :slight_smile: Thank you very much!
My system information (an old Lenovo V110 Laptop):
CPU: Intel Celeron N3350 (2) @ 2.400
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 500
Memory: 2048MiB / 7524MiB

4 Likes
#13

...advanced mate menu missing...???

#14

Install and testing on bare metal now. Not a bug in sight. All is fine.

1 Like
#15

I think they're using something that is a fork, called Brisk Menu. Have you tried that to see if it does what you're looking for?

#16

... neither brisk, neither whisker menu is not good ... Mate Menu was elegant, and well adjustable ... When I want brisk, can also use xfce or other desktop ...

1 Like
#17

I upgraded one computer months ago and had a few issues but no biggies, mostly graphical interface glitches/bugs. I just kept checking for and installed updates daily or every other day and the updates were coming in their droves.
I was so impressed with the stability that I upgraded a second desktop a couple of days ago.
I have only 2 little niggling things, one is about Yaru themes not having an orange option at present, especially orange-dark. The second is probably something that only applies to a miniscule number of users and one application.

1 Like
#18

I'm struggling to get ubuntu up and running on my Dell xps 15z laptop .. it only boots MBR partitions and the latest ubuntu's are GPT by default. I've used a windows machine and rufus to create a ubuntu live usb on mbr .. and it works great but .. when I go to install .. I select 'wipe everything and install' .. it seems to install but .. to GPT and after I remove the media and reboot ... it doesn't boot because of that reason .. .. The live usb works great though ..

#19

Is your pc gpt? If it is, try selecting a gpt mode to create a USB stick in rufus.
It also depends on what mode you used. Did you use either legacy or uefi?

#20

just upgrading from 20.04

  • the upgrade take insane amount of time... on a low power intel nuc it took 4 or 5 hours. Honestly it took all night because it ask for some file replacement and no one available to confirm.

  • the white theme (Yaru-Mate-Light) is an upgrade from the previous theme with a look from 80s or 90s

  • the icons look childish, rounded, colored intensely like a Christmas tree

  • the dark theme is intense colored ... we move away from the professional look to a computer for children

In the end I do not say that is not hard and well designed interface and theme, but everything is too intense like windows XP, icons are rounded like Android for "Home Entertainment"
For now I will stop upgrade other laptops, desktops, using daily this intense themes might not be my option, neither the white one...