Ubuntu mate and support 16.04

[Labbing]

Hello, I wanted to know if Mate 16.04 will be upgraded to version .6? How long will version 16.04 be supported?

[lah7]

Take a look at this announcement post:

Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS reaches end of life

Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS reached end of life on 30 April 2019. As we're an official flavour of Ubuntu, our LTS releases are supported for 3 years, as opposed to regular Ubuntu's 5 years. This means MATE components of your system will no longer receive updates after today, but foundational components will continue to receive security updates from Ubuntu. To check the support level of your system, run this command in the Terminal: ubuntu-support-status To continue the retrospective …

Officially as a flavour, 16.04 is no longer supported... but many regular Ubuntu packages will still receive updates until April 2021.

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

You can run this command in the Terminal to find out what's supported on your system:

ubuntu-support-status

Historically, there was an upgrade for MATE Desktop from 1.12 to 1.16 by adding this PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/xenial-mate
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade

The last decimal of the release is like a 'snapshot' indicator, so installing 16.04.6 would provide all the latest packages from the ISO up to that release date, which is also the same as taking 16.04.2 and applying all updates, which will update everything to 16.04.6.

As far as I know, .6 is the last point release of an Ubuntu cycle.

[arQon]

If you're curious as to whether or not you might want the PPA, the release notes for 1.16 are here: https://mate-desktop.org/blog/2016-09-21-mate-1-16-released/

@lah7 - I never knew that was available, but looking at those notes I see a lot of GTK3 references. Since NOT using GTK3 is the main reason my personal rig is still running 16.04, is it safe for me to try that PPA, or will I end up with all the GTK3 bugs and lost features of 18.04 etc?
(I can spin up a sacrificial VM if I have to, so if you don't know the answer off the top of your head don't worry about trying to find out).
Thanks.

[lah7]

If you're avoiding GTK3, I'd recommend sticking with MATE 1.12 - the latest in the 16.04 archives.

While most of it is still built against GTK2, there's a handful of MATE apps that became GTK3 only after 1.12 -- like System Monitor and Mozo (1.14) as well as Terminal, Engrampa and the shutdown dialogue box changed its look (1.16).

[arQon]

Thanks. That's an easy call then for me: System Monitor is one of the apps that lost functionality thanks to GTK3 (and also has new defects in 18.04, though IDK if those are directly caused by GTK3 or are from other changes).