Thomas Ward, the leader of the Lubuntu project and a member of the Ubuntu Technical Board, announced the formation of a new team of developers for the Ubuntu MATE distribution, which has taken over the maintenance of the project following the departure of its founder. There will not be a formal separate release of Ubuntu MATE 26.04, but packages with the MATE desktop for Ubuntu 26.04 will continue to be delivered and supported properly. The new development team has begun addressing and fixing the bugs that have accumulated over several years of stagnation while also working on updating MATE to version 1.28 from the outdated MATE 1.26 release formed in 2021.
Users of previous Ubuntu MATE versions can transition to the Ubuntu 26.04 package base by installing updates, but a separate installation image of Ubuntu MATE based on Ubuntu 26.04 will not be published. On new systems, any edition of Ubuntu 26.04 can be installed, after which the MATE desktop can be deployed using the command 'sudo apt install ubuntu-mate-desktop'. The fall release of Ubuntu MATE 26.10 is planned to be a full release.
Source: opennet.ru
