I just upgraded my "sandbox" machine, a ThinkPad Yoga 11e to Ubuntu MATE 25.10 "Questing Quokka" (wth is a "quokka?"). I sort of planned it, but when I booted the machine it immediately greeted me with "An upgrade is available. Do you want to upgrade?" and so I did.
The entire process took about an hour. I had to verify that my lock screen was disabled (it was) and the only question I had to answer was whether to keep or replace the GRUB menu (keep was the default, and would have been my choice, anyway).
I encountered absolutely no errors or eyebrow-raisers during the process.
Now, I run no esoteric software on this computer, so had I experienced any problems, I would have been more surprised than I was that there weren't.
I'm still attempting to see what's been added and what's been removed. All of the "surface" items (GUI, conky, etc.) are working as before. So, my very quick and initial review is that the install process and resulting operating system is smooth and flawless.
Ubuntu MATE got mentioned in all Ubuntu 25.10 release announcements put out by Ubuntu (I wouldn't expect it on others by Canonical; nor any other flavor either!).
Ubuntu MATE is lacking contributors, which is why I believe there was nothing specific to Ubuntu MATE.
How could someone, being a simple day-to-day user with no real terminal or programming experience, be of any contribution ?
What would be the actual tasks/contributions needed ? Asking here simply for those who have no idea what it means, what it may encompass in terms of time and involvement.
Knowing that, maybe some would raise their hand.
Yes, currently many of the teams are lacking developer contributions, which does need a technical background. Most is not directly programming as that is done by upstream developers, but packaging their work up, testing it etc, so its technical rather than the actual programming.
For programmers to fix bugs, they need to be discovered, and that is done pre-release by Quality Assurance testers. That requires a spare machine (or two) that you can do the testing on, install & test it like a normal user (not always using it as you may, but the tester may try and use the system as they believe others would). This isn't really technical, other than if problems are encountered; you know how to report and file a bug. Many of the installs tests are laid out in testcases so some of it is just following instructions anyway (testcases refers to the ISO QA tracker, which was used up to 25.10, but won't be used for resolute or 26.04; what we'll use this cycle is expected to documented and available for us to use later this month).
Helping other users on forums or sites such as this is still contributions too.
The need currently is mostly packagers, which is more a programmers assistant, but understanding of the technical aspects of programming would be a benefit.
I suspect a MOTU or flavor developer could probably better answer you, after all I'm not a developer myself; I work with Ubuntu News, having done some QA and other non-programming stuff myself for the project. Posting announcements of a release is a perfect example of a non-technical task too; it wasn't done as no-one did it. Myself I ensured Ubuntu News announcements were made, but didn't get to any flavor notifications for 25.10/questing
( MOTU = master of the universe, or someone with upload rights to universe )