Will MATE 1.26 be in Impish?

Does anyone know whether MATE 1.26 will be in 21.10? I've been using it from the PPA in 21.04, and it seems all good.

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Understand that I am a quality assurance guy, not a MATE Desktop maintainer. Please take what I say with a grain of salt, and if anybody more qualified is reading this, please chip in, too.


I looked around the 'Net and couldn't find a straight answer.

Personally, I'm going to guess that the UI freeze will arrive before MATE 1.26 can be integrated into Impish.

@Wimpy has been good about producing a MATE 1.26 PPA, but he's so tied up with other, more pressing stuff right now that I can't expect he'll get around to updating MATE before September 9th (or whenever Ubuntu MATE's UI freeze occurs).

Among the more pressing issues, I'm sure our visually impaired users will hate us all if Ubiquity isn't patched by 21.10. (There's an ongoing issue where Ubiquity, Ubuntu's installer, doesn't talk to the screen reader, and therefore blind users are out of luck in trying to install Ubuntu MATE themselves. I proposed a merge request to solve the issue, but the Ubuntu Desktop Team is supposedly reviewing the proposal now.)

But I still have fairly high hopes that MATE 1.26 will appear in 22.04. Not much solace to anybody who wants MATE 1.26 faster, but let's face it -- the desktop came out in mid-August and bugs take a remarkable amount of time to appear, so does anybody really want a rushed release? I sure don't want a repeat of 20.04 "Focal Fossa" -- I recall a lot of broken MATE desktop components in that release, partly since MATE 1.24 had been released two months earlier. And that was just embarrassing, because this was supposed to be a stable LTS release!

In other words, I would not expect MATE 1.26 to appear in Impish at all. Too much other stuff to do, and it really hasn't been bug-tested enough (despite what you may think -- sorry) and is going to be a big quality assurance problem for some time to come.


That's just my two cents. Take it for what it's worth.

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Thanks for the comprehensive answer! I was just curious. Not trying to rush things...

TBH, there's nothing really wrong with 1.24 (in my usage of it) that makes me all that anxious to move on.

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@gordon has some great points in his above posting.

However :grinning: we are happy to announce that MATE 1.26 has been approved for use in the 21.10 release :fireworks:

Feature freeze, Debian import freeze, and the actual release of the MATE 1.26 Desktop were all working against each other date wise. In this case Wimpy had gotten them uploaded but they were being held in the proposed-pocket pending archive approval, which now has been granted.

They should be appearing on the next spin of the testing ISO. Regular apt updates will bring them in for anyone currently testing 21.10.

Thanks for your patience; please start testing and reporting bugs to Launchpad :beetle:

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This change had to have just landed! I checked packages.ubuntu.com last night right before I ran my mouth off and MATE 1.26 hadn't been incorporated into Impish yet.

Well, I guess I'm happy about the update. I've been waiting to retry the Ubuntu MATE 21.10 daily build, but as soon as the daily build includes MATE 1.26, I'll jump right on :frog: to testing it out.

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I apt updated this morning on my impish system, and it wasn't there. After I saw franksmbc's reply, I checked again, and there it was! Testing now...

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