[EDITED BY THE AUTHOR: I decided to take a look at UM 25.10 on actual hardware (installing on my Asus Vivobook directly) and had the chance to review it. Changes to my review are clearly marked below in bold text in square brackets and the original post is kept at the bottom for comparison purposes.]
Finally, I got to take a look at Ubuntu MATE 25.10 today – It is kind of fun doing these reviews and play around with a release every 6 months so I might try and keep this going.
First, the installation environment:
I installed UM 25.10 [on actual hardware (Asus Vivobook laptop)]. This laptop is pretty bad in general but it makes for a great test machine (rather than end up as e-waste).
Secondly, the installation (into the environment 
): (ok, excuse the bad jokes, it’s been a long Friday)
Live environment booted up very quickly, but HOLY, the Ubuntu installer (flutter installer) was flickering like crazy [even when installing directly on hardware, it was being flickery like this]. I haven’t used the flutter installer recently (I think it’s been a few months since I installed a version of Ubuntu using this) and the graphical glitches were really unfortunate. I now understand people’s displeasure with the flutter installer as, although it worked, the flickering was horrible.
However, that aside, it installed very quickly which was nice. I always love UM for its lightweight resource use and how quick everything just seems to go.
Thirdly, testing my fresh install:
Pros:
- It was very fast and responsive, as always. UM sure is one of the best distros for a computer that just goes at the speed of light, and it is so appreciated!
- Light on resources (about 800M on cold boot according to
htop). Awesome! [I didn’t checkhtopon the install on real hardware, but I would assume it would be similar.] - [The switch to Slick Greeter is great in my opinion (though I think that was done earlier in 24.10 or something), especially getting to personalise the greeter using a GUI without having to dive into gsettings. It also doesn’t have the bugs Arctica Greeter had. Job well done on this decision!]
Cons:
- No new wallpapers with the Questing Quokka (still Oracular Oriole).
- [Display issues redacted as they were a VM issue. UM worked like a dream as always (and looked awesome when I installed the legacy wallpapers again – personal opinion).]
Conclusion:
[Loved this release overall on real hardware and I’m glad the issues I experienced were VM issues. Other than the Flutter installer, everything worked seamlessly. Great job team!]
I always will love Ubuntu MATE and this team / community – everyone works so hard and I do want to give a huge congratulations to all involved in another UM release, version 25.10, and this community is so uniquely helpful and kind compared to others I’ve experienced.
I hope this will be helpful. Thank you for reading.
===========================================================================
ORIGINAL POST
Finally, I got to take a look at Ubuntu MATE 25.10 today – It is kind of fun doing these reviews and play around with a release every 6 months so I might try and keep this going.
First, the installation environment:
I installed UM 25.10 in a Virtual Machine (VM) using QEMU/KVM Virtual Machine Manager. I allotted 4 GiB of RAM, 60 GiB of virtual hard drive space, and 4 CPU.
The host machine is Asus Vivobook laptop that (at the time of writing) is running Kubuntu 24.04.3 LTS. This laptop is pretty bad in general but it makes for a great test machine (rather than end up as e-waste).
Secondly, the installation (into the environment ): (ok, excuse the bad jokes, it’s been a long Friday)
Live environment booted up very quickly, but HOLY, the Ubuntu installer (flutter installer) was flickering like crazy. I haven’t used the flutter installer recently (I think it’s been a few months since I installed a version of Ubuntu using this) and the graphical glitches were really unfortunate. I now understand people’s displeasure with the flutter installer as, although it worked, the flickering was horrible.
However, that aside, it installed very quickly which was nice. I always love UM for its lightweight resource use and how quick everything just seems to go.
Thirdly, testing my fresh install:
Pros:
- It was very fast and responsive, as always. UM sure is one of the best distros for a computer that just goes at the speed of light, and it is so appreciated!
- Light on resources (about 800M on cold boot according to
htop). Awesome!
Cons:
- No new wallpapers with the Questing Quokka (still Oracular Oriole).
- Display issues out the wazoo: As usual in a VM, I needed to set the resolution myself to 1920x1080. However, once I did, it would not let me keep it (trying to click the box to keep the settings would unfocus the window then, after 30 sec??? (I think), it reset back to the very low default resolution) and also deleted the two panels (with running
mate-panel –resetnot doing anything). Once I tried a couple times with no success, I had to set the display resolution usingxrandr -s 1920x1080which worked. Nothing brought the panels back though. - After a while, I got a pop-up about Ubuntu 25.10 experienced an error and the crashed package was
marco(which makes sense given the point above).
Conclusion:
Unfortunately, I was not overly happy with this release at this point for a first impression (with the understanding that software will experience more bugs immediately following release rather than giving it 1-2 months or so). The installer and display issues were something I could not ignore and my hope is these were issues related somehow to the VM.
Although I’ve changed my position on this a few times in the past, I am an LTS user for production, and I will always recommend LTS versions going forward to anyone looking to install Ubuntu MATE (or any flavour for that matter) on a machine intended for production use.
I always will love Ubuntu MATE and this team / community – everyone works so hard and I do want to give a huge congratulations to all involved in another UM release, version 25.10, and this community is so uniquely helpful and kind compared to others I’ve experienced.
However, I must be honest, and I cannot ignore the problems I encountered in my test run today. I believe that, only by being honest can we solve problems that are encountered and make the greatest experience possible for our beloved distribution.
I hope this will be helpful. Thank you for reading.
Jaymo
