Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS Release Notes

Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS is the culmination of 2 years of continual improvement 😅 to Ubuntu and MATE Desktop. As is tradition, the LTS development cycle has a keen focus on eliminating paper 🧻 cuts 🔪 but we’ve jammed in some new features and a fresh coat of paint too 🖌 The following is a summary of what’s new since Ubuntu MATE 21.10 and some reminders of how we got here from 20.04. Read on to learn more 🧑‍🎓

Thank you! 🙇

I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to everyone who has played an active role in improving Ubuntu MATE for this LTS release 👏 From reporting bugs, submitting translations, providing patches, contributing to our crowd funding, developing new features, creating artwork, offering community support, actively testing and providing QA feedback to writing documentation or creating this fabulous website. Thank you! Thank you all for getting out there and making a difference! 💚

Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) - Mutiny layout with Yark-MATE-dark

What’s changed?

Here are the highlights of what’s changed recently.

MATE Desktop 1.26.1 🧉

Ubuntu MATE 22.04 features MATE Desktop 1.26.1. MATE Desktop 1.26.0 was introduced in 21.10 and benefits from significant effort 😅 in fixing bugs 🐛 in MATE Desktop, optimising performance ⚡ and plugging memory leaks. MATE Desktop 1.26.1 addresses the bugs we discovered following the initial 1.26.0 release. Our community also fixed some bugs in Plank and Brisk Menu 👍 and also fixed the screen reader during installs for visually impaired users 🥰 In all over 500 bugs have been addressed in this release 🩹

Yaru 🎨

Ubuntu MATE 21.04 was the first release to ship with a MATE variant of the Yaru theme. A year later and we’ve been working hard with members of the Yaru and Ubuntu Desktop teams to bring full MATE compatibility to upstream Yaru, including all the accent colour varieties. All reported bugs 🐞 in the Yaru implementation for MATE have also been fixed 🛠

Yaru Themes in Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS

Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS ships with all the Yaru themes, including our own “chelsea cucumber” version 🥒 The legacy Ambiant/Radiant themes are no longer installed by default and neither are the stock MATE Desktop themes. We’ve added an automatic settings migration to transition users who upgrade to an appropriate Yaru MATE theme.

Cherries on top 🍒

In collaboration with Paul Kepinski 🇫🇷 (Yaru team) and Marco Trevisan 🇮🇹 (Ubuntu Desktop team) we’ve added dark/light panels and panel icons to Yaru for MATE Desktop and Unity. I’ve added a collection of new dark/light panel icons to Yaru for popular apps with indicators such as Steam, Dropbox, uLauncher, RedShift, Transmission, Variety, etc.

Light and Dark panels

I’ve added patches 🩹 to the Appearance Control Center that applies theme changes to Plank (the dock), Pluma (text editor) and correctly toggles the colour scheme preference for GNOME 42 apps. When you choose a dark theme, everything will go dark in unison 🥷 and vice versa.

So, Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS is now using everything Yaru/Suru has to offer. 🎉

AI Generated wallpapers

My friend Simon Butcher 🇬🇧 is Head of Research Platforms at Queen Mary University of London managing the Apocrita HPC cluster service. He’s been creating AI 🤖 generated art using bleeding edge CLIP guided diffusion models 🖌 The results are pretty incredible and we’ve included the 3 top voted “Jammy Jellyfish” in our wallpaper selection as their vivid and vibrant styles compliment the Yaru accent colour theme options very nicely indeed 😎

If you want the complete set, here’s a tarball of all 8 wallpapers at 3840x2160:

• AI Generated “Jammy Jelly” by Simon Butcher 🎁 (22MB)

Ubuntu MATE stuff 🧉

Ubuntu MATE has a few distinctive apps and integrations of it’s own, here’s a run down of what’s new and shiny ✨

MATE Tweak

Switching layouts with MATE Tweak is its most celebrated feature. We’ve improved the reliability of desktop layout switching and restoring custom layouts is now 100% accurate 💯

Having your desktop your way in Ubuntu MATE

We’ve removed mate-netbook from the default installation of Ubuntu MATE and as a result the Netbook layout is no longer available. We did this because mate-maximus, a component of mate-netbook, is the cause of some compatibility issues with client side decorated (CSD) windows. There are still several panel layouts that offer efficient resolution use 📐 for those who need it.

MATE Tweak has refreshed its supported for 3rd party compositors. Support for Compton has been dropped, as it is no longer actively maintained and comprehensive support for picom has been added. picom has three compositor options: Xrender, GLX and Hybrid. All three are can be selected via MATE Tweak as the performance and compatibility of each varies depending on your hardware. Some people choose to use picom because they get better gaming performance or screen tearing is reduced. Some just like subtle animation effects picom adds 💖

MATE HUD

Recent versions of rofi, the tool used by MATE HUD to visualise menu searches, has a new theme system. MATE HUD has been updated to support this new theme engine and comes with two MATE specific themes (mate-hud and mate-hud-rounded) that automatically adapt to match the currently selected GTK theme.

You can add your own rofi themes to ~/.local/share/rofi/themes. Should you want to, you can use any rofi theme in MATE HUD. Use Alt + F2 to run rofi-theme-selector to try out the different themes, and if there is one you prefer you can set it as default by using running the following in a terminal:

gsettings set org.mate.hud rofi-theme <theme name>

MATE HUD uses the new rofi theme engine

Windows & Shadows

I’ve updated the Metacity/Marco (the MATE Window Manager) themes in Yaru to make sure they match GNOME/CSD/Handy windows for a consistent look and feel across all window types 🪟 and 3rd party compositors like picom. I even patched how Marco and picom render shadows so windows they look cohesive regardless of toolkit or compositor being used.

Ubuntu MATE Welcome & Boutique

The Software Boutique has been restocked with software for 22.04 and Firefox 🔥🦊 ESR (.deb) has been added to the Browser Ballot in Ubuntu MATE Welcome.

Comprehensive browser options just a click away

41% less fat 🍩

Ubuntu MATE, like it’s lead developer, was starting to get a bit large around the mid section 😊 During the development of 22.04, the image 📀 got to 4.1GB 😮

So, we put Ubuntu MATE on a strict diet 🥗 We’ve removed the proprietary NVIDIA drivers from the local apt pool on the install media and thanks to migrating fully to Yaru (which now features excellent de-duplication of icons) and also removing our legacy themes/icons. And now the Yaru-MATE themes/icons are completely in upstream Yaru, we were able to remove 3 snaps from the default install and the image is now a much more reasonable 2.7GB; 41% smaller. 🗜

This is important to us, because the majority of our users are in countries where Internet bandwidth is not always plentiful. Those of you with NVIDIA GPUs, don’t worry. If you tick the 3rd party software and drivers during the install the appropriate driver for your GPU will be downloaded and installed 👍

NVIDIA GPU owners should tick Install 3rd party software and drivers during install

While investigating 🕵 a bug in Xorg Server that caused Marco (the MATE window manager) to crash we discovered that Marco has lower frame time latency ⏱ when using Xrender with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers. We’ve published a PPA where NVIDIA GPU users can install a version of Marco that uses Xpresent for optimal performance ⚡

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/marco
sudo apt upgrade

Should you want to revert this change you install ppa-purge and run the following from a terminal: sudo ppa-purge -o ubuntu-mate-dev -p marco.

But wait! There’s more! 😲

These reductions in size are after we added three new applications to the default install on Ubuntu MATE: GNOME Clocks, Maps and Weather My family and I 👨‍👩‍👧 have found these applications particularly useful and use them regularly on our laptops without having to reach for a phone or tablet.

New additions to the default desktop application in Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS

For those of you who like a minimal base platform, then the minimal install option is still available which delivers just the essential Ubuntu MATE Desktop and Firefox browser. You can then build up from there 👷

Packages, packages, packages 📦

It doesn’t matter how you like to consume your Linux 🐧 packages, Ubuntu MATE has got you covered with PPA, Snap, AppImage and FlatPak support baked in by default. You’ll find flatpak, snapd and xdg-desktop-portal-gtk to support Snap and FlatPak and the (ageing) libfuse2 to support AppImage are all pre-installed.

Although flatpak is installed, FlatHub is not enabled by default. To enable FlatHub run the following in a terminal:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

We’ve also included snapd-desktop-integration which provides a bridge between the user’s session and snapd to integrate theme preferences 🎨 with snapped apps and can also automatically install snapped themes 👔 All the Yaru themes shipped in Ubuntu MATE are fully snap aware.

Ayatana Indicators

Ubuntu MATE 20.10 transitioned to Ayatana Indicators 🚥 As a quick refresher, Ayatana Indicators are a fork of Ubuntu Indicators that aim to be cross-distro compatible and re-usable for any desktop environment 👌

Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS comes with Ayatana Indicators 22.2.0 and sees the return of Messages Indicator 📬 to the default install. Ayatana Indicators now provide improved backwards compatibility to Ubuntu Indicators and no longer requires the installation of two sets of libraries, saving RAM, CPU cycles and improving battery endurance 🔋

Ayatana Indicators Settings

To compliment the BlueZ 5.64 protocol stack in Ubuntu, Ubuntu MATE ships Blueman 2.2.4 which offers comprehensive management of Bluetooth devices and much improved pairing compatibility 💙🦷

I also patched mate-power-manager, ayatana-indicator-power and Yaru to add support for battery powered gaming input devices, such as controllers 🎮 and joysticks 🕹

Active Directory

And in case you missed it, the Ubuntu Desktop team added the option to enroll your computer into an Active Directory domain 🔑 during install. Ubuntu MATE has supported the same capability since it was first made available in the 20.10 release.

Raspberry Pi image 🥧

• Should be available very shortly after the release of 22.04.

Major Applications

Accompanying MATE Desktop 1.26.1 and Linux 5.15 are Firefox 99.0, Celluloid 0.20, Evolution 3.44 & LibreOffice 7.3.2.1

See the Ubuntu 22.04 Release Notes for details of all the changes and improvements that Ubuntu MATE benefits from.

Upgrading from Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS and 21.10

You can upgrade to Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS from Ubuntu MATE either 20.04 LTS or 21.10. Ensure that you have all updates installed for your current version of Ubuntu MATE before you upgrade.

• Open the “Software & Updates” from the Control Center.
• Select the 3rd Tab called “Updates”.
• Set the “Notify me of a new Ubuntu version” drop down menu to “For long-term support versions” if you are using 20.04 LTS; set it to “For any new version” if you are using 21.10.
• Press Alt+F2 and type in update-manager -c -d into the command box.
• Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release ‘XX.XX’ is available.
  • If not, you can use /usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/check-new-release-gtk
• Click “Upgrade” and follow the on-screen instructions.

There are no offline upgrade options for Ubuntu MATE. Please ensure you have network connectivity to one of the official mirrors or to a locally accessible mirror and follow the instructions above.

Feedback

Is there anything you can help with or want to be involved in? Maybe you just want to discuss your experiences or ask the maintainers some questions. Please come and talk to us.