Hi!
First of all I want to thanks Mate developpers and staff, I’m so in love with Mate desktop.
Yesterday I red somewhere a brief notice saying that Mate will not be one of the flavor of Ubuntu for 26.04 release, the same for Unity and Kubuntu (KDE desktop).
Is it true? Mate is leaving Ubuntu?
I sincerely hope it is a fake news.
I saw the same somewhere on Reddit yesterday.
Its is essentially fake news at this point. There are builds of 26.04 available for testing. While it hasnt applied for LTS qualification, that doesn't mean it wont get it - for example 24.04 wasnt given qualification as an LTS until April 2024.
None of this is a 100% guarantee but I would put money on UM 26.04 being released.
There is a lengthy discussion of this already on the forum: The future of Ubuntu MATE?
Confirming that this news is fake, seems people twist things and not reading nor understanding what has been said.
Ubuntu Mate and Ubuntu Unity will have a 26.04 release but these will be regular releases and not LTS releases. Kubuntu will also have a release but they still have to apply for a requalification request.
I'm involved with the Ubuntu project in various teams, including the Ubuntu News team, and I've read no such news!
I also attend (when I can) the flavor sync meetings and more, and so am familiar with some news that isn't public, but again I'm unaware of such news.
The main news I'm aware of was from 2 December 2025, where I'll quote from UWN 921
LTS qualifications for Resolute Raccoon
Robie Basak reports the Ubuntu Technical Board have agreed that Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Ubuntu Cinnamon have been approved for LTS status for the Ubuntu 26.04 release. The remaining flavors are still subject to approval on request and will be non-LTS.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2025-December/003082.html
ie. the LTS status is no longer to be expected, but Ubuntu MATE 26.04 is still assumed (at this stage) will release.
If you recall back to the 25.10 cycle; a milestone was missed by the Ubuntu MATE team, BUT they still applied belatedly and got approval to release Ubuntu MATE 25.10, which was required so they could release Ubuntu MATE 26.04. The team haven't lost that right yet.
The Ubuntu MATE team lacks contributors as I see it.
Not only Ubuntu Mate lacks contibutors, Xubuntu also needs contributors (their team is small and struggling and also have private life obligations) and of course Ubuntu Unity too.
Ogra told us yesterday on IRC that Ubuntu Mate always has been a one man show. The same counts for Ubuntu Unity, since i’ve been involved in the project for five years now as admin/moderator and tester, i can confirm that it was a one man show.
To be fair: Every (smaller) open source project lacks contributors. Hexchat for example was discontinued because it wasn’t maintained anymore and no one stepped up to do so.
What i have learned in the almost 19 years that i’m active in the linux world and been/being involved in various projects, is that people demand a lot (want changes, fixes, new features etc.). There’s also a group of people who like to help out but run away as fast as they came when they’ve been showed the way on where to look and how to start. And you never hear from them again.
As one project lead said a week or two ago on irc, the community isn’t what it used to be. I have to agree on that and we see it everywhere. It’s kinda sad that the interest, passion and dedication faded away. Probably they are spending too much time on social media (Insta, FB, X/Twitter, Reddit) on their devices posting toxic comments and nonsense instead of actually doing something useful. Why i say that? If you look at the IRC, Matrix, Telegram and Discord channels, they aren’t as active anymore as they were years ago.
One could argue about why Canonical doesn’t step up and help but we must not forget that the official Ubuntu flavors are all community driven projects and it’s up to the community to keep things going. Canonical provides the iso building part, repo’s and hosts the iso’s and we should be thankful for that.
Thanks a lot for your answers, now I understand better the situation.
I can’t write software and my english is very poor, I try to support with donations when I can do it. I understand that is hard to develop and maintain a distribution and once more I say “many thanks to all of you that make Mate living”.
I am now on UM 26.04.
They say an interim release may be unstable.
If my teenagers had been unstable like that, I wouldn’t have white hairs. 
Lets see…
W
I completely agree that the 26.04 development release, in its current state, represents a very stable release, in my view.
It is my hope that each additional migration of various modules to
maintain that same stability.
As we all know, that would be an amazing achievement, deserving of recognition, even if it never gets the official LTS designation.
Hi, @Watford 
You wrote:
I am now on UM 26.04.
Well, NOT quite Regarding Ubuntu (and its flavors like Ubuntu MATE), a version 26.04 means that it will be released in the year 2026 (that's the "26" part), specifically in April (that's the "04" part, because April is the 4th month of a year). Since it's now December 2025, we're still a few months from that version being released.
What you are probably using now is a "pre-release version" / "development version" of what will eventually be Ubuntu MATE 26.04 (Resolute Raccoon).
So, if you run the following command, I'm guessing that you will get the expression development branch in the Description: line of the corresponding output:
lsb_release -a
Right, Ric
Hence making reference to ‘interim release’ in my short post and also not adding ‘LTS’ when saying I am now on…
W
p.s. no worries… the Raccoon here is quite Resolute 
12 posts were split to a new topic: Networking issue with 26.04 daily and zsync
Huh. I’ve never noticed that Mate was packaged with Ubuntu. I always install it from Terminal. Wouldn’t that still work?
If you were to do an apt info mate-desktop ubuntu-mate-desktop you'd see the following (note: I'm using these two packages as examples; one is maintained by a combined team, whilst the second is Ubuntu MATE specific)
Package: mate-desktop
Version: 1.28.2-1
Priority: optional
Section: universe/x11
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]>
Original-Maintainer: Debian+Ubuntu MATE Packaging Team <[email protected]>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
...
Package: ubuntu-mate-desktop
Version: 1.306
Priority: optional
Section: universe/metapackages
Source: ubuntu-mate-meta
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
and that was on my current Ubuntu system, if I run the command on a Debian box it's essentially the same detail
guiverc@de2900:~$ apt info mate-desktop
Package: mate-desktop
Version: 1.26.0-2
Priority: optional
Section: x11
Maintainer: Debian+Ubuntu MATE Packaging Team <[email protected]>
MATE is packaged by the "Debian+Ubuntu MATE Packaging Team", and lack of resources in one does tend to impact the other (noticed by users of Debian testing for example); which is part of why MATE has received fewer fixes of late, and when some work was done but problems arose, the packages have remained stuck there for a longish time before another Debian/Ubuntu (GNOME) developer helped to fix the issue allowing MATE to finally upload & build.
The result of fewer contributors is shown in the packages we've seen of late (my opinion), eg.
mate-desktop | 1.20.1-2ubuntu1 | bionic/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x
mate-desktop | 1.24.0-2 | focal/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
mate-desktop | 1.26.0-1 | jammy/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
mate-desktop | 1.26.2-1.1build3 | noble/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
mate-desktop | 1.26.2-1.2 | plucky/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
mate-desktop | 1.26.2-1.2build1 | questing/universe | source, amd64, amd64v3, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
mate-desktop | 1.28.2-1 | resolute/universe | source, amd64, amd64v3, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
with resolute having the newer version thankfully as the GNOME developer fixed an issue.
Yes the upstream packages should still be in the repository, but there could be fewer updates & thus Ubuntu could have older software. Further as Debian releases in the odd year (when ready), Ubuntu LTS would always have the prior year's version if it was only uploaded by Debian's developers for their own release. The Ubuntu specific packages (ubuntu-mate-desktop in my example) would just risk being stale (until removed) if left unmaintained.
LXDE is probably a good example to consider; it was used by Lubuntu until they switched to LXQt back in mid-2018; but LXDE packages still exist in Ubuntu repositories; no longer maintained by Lubuntu team but are now purely upstream Debian imports. Some users of Ubuntu who still use them may have noticed changes (Lubuntu defaults differed to upstream's Debian with LXDE) but once encountered these are easily worked around anyway.
Packages do tend to remain in repositories as long as someone helps maintain them.
Please note: I'm not a Ubuntu MATE developer, not even a developer, so this reply maybe less than if a developer had written it.
Thank you all for your replies, I close this topic.
Hey guys, sorry for bringing this thread back up, but it seems the best way to ask this question:
Who’s building current Ubuntu MATE releases? Like current pre-release version, development version, alpha, or whatever is called the current state of 26.04
I’m asking out of curiosity, just to learn how it works.
Same question goes to any of the other flavors, as I’ve read here and somewhere else about daily builds and all that; I guess there has to be someone, an actual human being, who builds the final releases, LTS or not.
I’ve been an Ubuntu user, later Xubuntu user and later Ubuntu MATE user for many years, but never really knew about the mechanics behind it.
This cycle hasn't happened exactly as I understood it would, as new QA testing procedures that were supposed to be put in place last year aren't yet 'ready.... so it's the same as all prior cycles I've been involved with.
ISOs for Ubuntu products are built by software kicked off on a cron job, controlled on launchpad.
I've written an answer on a support site that maybe worth a look
alas it doesn't tell you much anyway.
No person actually builds them, it's done automatically on a cron job, that cron job is controlled by the Ubuntu Release team.
Any product manager can kick off a new build if required (it takes hours anyway; so it's avoided unless necessary), and the ISO QA tracker will show those Admin options if you have the appropriate rights (why you need to login; what you see is determined by your permissions), which is what I mention in my answer.
Either ways it's these builds that appear in the ISO QA tracker
or are found at
though that's dailies ONLY; the released ISOs need to intentionally put there by the Ubuntu Release team... ie. the product managers can only really kick off ISO builds & some other basic needed functions.
For special purpose testing ISOs (created by developer/users, or an actual person & not just infrastructure), they'll be located at different places.. eg. if you receive a request to test a specific fix by a Ubuntu developer, they may provide a link to ISO found at another location, maybe even people.ubuntu.com (that site is being closed down; but it has been used for that purpose)
All official flavors are the same in this regard; in the past when I did have product manager status for a flavor; the Admin options would appear for all products & not just the one I actually was credentialed for (do note product manager isn't a single person; it's more like a credential). The flavor ISOs are all build on the same Ubuntu infrastructure, and it's these found at the site(s) I mentioned earlier.
If you scan recent days (24.04.4 release), there is mention (matrix room) of a flavor lead trying to mark his team as ready for release, but was unable to on the phone. What I've talked about is the same tool as what I've mentioned here; in the past I could have said "I'll do it for you" & done it, alas I see none of that now when I login (product manager status having been removed from my launchpad account)... If you ever become a developer or member in a flavor team, you'll quickly find we're all part of the Ubuntu team & work together as much as we can!
Thank you very much @guiverc !
Fully understood. Could not ask for a better explanation. 
Very good, Guiverc
Very good for those convinced and getting “cranky” that the show should have started 30 minutes ago, while not having the slightness idea of what goes on behind the curtain.
All thanks also for your patience at writing these explanations and other things
W
I mention product managers (accounts with that status on launchpad) can kick off ISO builds; that of course has its limits; ie. the Ubuntu Release Team have most control; but product managers can only kick off builds for unreleased products that aren't frozen, so resolute or what will be 26.04, or actually a new ISO for noble (as 24.04.5 hasn't been released yet; that right will disappear once that ISO has been frozen/released for all but Ubuntu Release team)... so powers do have limits. (Probably obvious anyway)
If interested in how the ISOs are controlled; it's via seed files I've written about many times here & elsewhere anyway; eg.
with all seed files found at https://ubuntu-archive-team.ubuntu.com/seeds/
As all releases/seeds can be found there; we can contrast changes between flavors, releases and more... I still tend to find the manifest files more useful for my own needs, but where a manifest tells me what's on an ISO, the seed file(s) tells me why it's there.