@Wimpy Thanks for everything you've done for this community and for the MATE desktop itself 
@ericmarceau with regards to the upstream MATE Desktop itself, the team currently looks like this:
- 3 developers working and communicating almost daily (basically the "admin" team)
- 1-2 core developers occasionally helping with ad-hoc reviews and bug fixes
- a handful of semi-regular contributors
- assorted distro maintainers (I work regularly with the Fedora one, and have occasional comms with someone from OpenBSD)
Currently a lot of the discussions and admin work are centered around the following:
- Continuous Integration: most pipelines are now cleaned up, goal is to increase confidence in our merge builds and releases
- Release cadence: we're actively discussing this, but the idea is more frequent releases based on what gets actually committed, rather than heuristics like "it's been 2 years, maybe we should tag a new major version"
- Translation: we've relied on a clunky closed-source system for years. The Fedora l10n team is helping us transition to an open source system they host to make things easier and more automated
- Governance: how we make decisions. Instead of having a single project leader making all the important decisions, we've gotten to a point where we consult one another regularly, but at the same time trust one another to decide what's best for the project
And a lot of the actual software development is in these areas:
- Wayland development: Goal is to get MATE to a good working state with Wayland by the time major distros start dropping X11 (assuming that ever happens)
- GTK: Goal is to ensure we're not using deprecated APIs in GTK3, and in the worst case scenario prepare for a GTK4 migration (no one wants this, but we're actively thinking about the future here)
- Backlog: Goal is to address all the papercuts users have been complaining about, sometimes for over a decade
I know MATE Desktop doesn't seem like it moves a lot, but just this month (March 2026) we've merged 129 commits across 41 repositories. About half of those are bug fixes and features, the other half are related to fixing pipelines, updating dependencies, and streamlining our build process.