Ubuntu MATE 22.10 is a modest update by recent standards and focused on “quality
of life improvements”. And there is good reason why this release of Ubuntu MATE
doesn’t feature the usual bucket 🪣 list of changes you’d typically expect, and
that’s because I’ve been helping bring the full Ubuntu MATE experience to Debian
MATE 🧉
This may raise some questions for Ubuntu MATE users, so let’s try and address them:
I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to everyone who has played an active role
in improving Ubuntu MATE for this 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 22.10 using the Pantheon layout and new centered panel applets and HUD
Here are the highlights of what’s changed since the release of Ubuntu MATE 22.04
The usual point release updates to MATE Desktop and
Ayatana Indicators have been included
that fix 🩹 an assortment on minor bugs 🐛 The main change in MATE Desktop
is to MATE Panel, where we’ve included an early snapshot release of mate-panel
1.27.0 along with a patch set that adds centre alignment of panel applets.
This much requested feature comes from Ubuntu MATE community contributor
Gordon N. Squash 🇺🇸 and allows panel applets to
be centre aligned, as well as the usual left and right alignment. I’m sure
you’ll all join me in thanking 🙇 Gordon for working on this feature.
Centre aligning of applet icons will ship with MATE Desktop 1.28, but we’re
including it early 🐓 for Ubuntu MATE users. We’ve updated MATE Tweak to
correctly save/restore custom layouts that use centre aligned applets and all
the panel layouts shipped with Ubuntu MATE 22.10 have been updated so they’re
compatible with center alignment of applets ✅
My friend Simon Butcher 🇬🇧 is Head of
Research Platforms at Queen Mary University of London managing the Apocrita HPC
cluster service. Once again, Simon has created some stunning AI generated 🤖🧠
wallpapers for Ubuntu MATE using bleeding edge diffusion models 🖌 The samples
below are 1920×1080 but the versions include in Ubuntu MATE 22.10 are 3840×2160.
Here’s what Simon has to say about about some of the challenges he faced
creating these new wallpapers for Kinetic Kudu:
AI image generation is continuing to improve at a mind-boggling rate. Yet, until recently, coherent human faces, hands and anatomically correct animals have proved rather tricky. Fortunately human faces are getting particular attention in the open source community after the release of Stable Diffusion. However, while an anthropomorphic portrait of a Kudu wearing a rather dapper suit will be stylishly rendered, getting consistent results for kudu in their natural habitat proved particularly tricky, exacerbated by their elegant horn structure. Often you will get rather wild interpretations of the horns, 5 legged creatures, or nightmarish output akin to the Pushmi-Pullyu from the Dr Doolittle stories.
Jellyfish, on the other hand, are a mass of tentacles and perhaps benefit aesthetically from the randomness induced by AI-generated images, in the same way that forests, mountains and hobbit villages generated by AI can be produced en-masse to a very satisfying extent. So while 1000 stunning unique images of jellyfish can be produced in a few minutes with a powerful GPU, the kudu was quite a challenge, and I had to experiment a lot with various prompts and styles, and a lot of cherry-picking – throwing away about 99% of the results that weren’t quite right. For the next release, I’m hoping we’ll see further AI innovation in time for the next release, or…maybe the next code name will be a lionfish?
PulseAudio has been replaced with PipeWire and Bluetooth audio codec support
has been expanded with the addition of AAC, LDAC, aptX and aptX HD.
As a podcaster and streamer
I’m delighted to have PipeWire installed by default in Ubuntu MATE 22.10. The
migration to PipeWire has resolved some longstanding minor annoyances I’ve had
with audio in that past and all the tools 🧰 I use for audio and video
production continue to function correctly.
If you like to ride the LTS train 🚆 but want to use PipeWire in Ubuntu MATE
22.04 (as I have been doing for some months) then this is how to make the
change:
sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-pipewire pipewire-audio-client-libraries wireplumber
sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
sudo apt-get install libfdk-aac2 libldacbt-abr2 libldacbt-enc2 libopenaptx0 libspa-0.2-bluetooth libspa-0.2-jack
Once the installs/removals are complete restart your computer.
The “MATE HUD” has seen some significant work from community contributor
twa022 🌎. The HUD now supports MATE, XFCE
and Budgie, has improved accuracy for HUD placement (taking into account various
panel offsets/struts), is highly configurable and includes a new HUD settings app ✨
HUD Settings
A new utility, User Manager, has been added to complement the suite of MATE
tools. User Manager replaces the aging gnome-system-tools which was
removed from Ubuntu MATE in the 22.04 release and allows you to add/modify/remove
user accounts. It also includes the ability to define which users are Administrators,
enable/disable auto-login, set profile images and manage group memberships.
MATE User Manager
And last but not least, the Ubuntu MATE Artwork package has been updated to
include all the refinements and improvements in the suite of
Yaru themes 🎨
Accompanying MATE Desktop 1.26.1 🧉 and Linux 5.19 🐧 are Firefox 105 🔥🦊,
Celluloid 0.20 🎥, Evolution 3.46 📧, LibreOffice 7.4 📚
See the Ubuntu 22.10 Release Notes
for details of all the changes and improvements that Ubuntu MATE benefits from.
You can upgrade to Ubuntu MATE 22.10 from Ubuntu MATE 22.04. Ensure that you
have all updates installed for your current version of Ubuntu MATE before you
upgrade.
update-manager -c -d into the command box./usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/check-new-release-gtkThere 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.
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.
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