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

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 3840×2160:

• 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 

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.