Ubuntu MATE & Unity Will NOT Be Official Ubuntu 26.04 Flavors

For users of Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Unity, the 2 Linux Distributions will NOT be the official flavors for the next Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

Ubuntu announced the LTS qualifications for Resolute Raccoon in last week:

We haven’t seen LTS requalification requests from Ubuntu MATE nor Ubuntu Unity, so these will release subject to release team approval, and they will be non-LTS.

As you know, the Ubuntu flavors are the community maintained distributions with different desktop environments or specific intended use case. So far, Ubuntu has 10 official flavors, they are listed in this Ubuntu web-page.

Ubuntu always requires the official flavors to go through a qualification process for every releases, especially for LTS. For next Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, the following flavors have been approved with three year LTS qualification.

• Ubuntu Budgie
• Ubuntu Kylin
• Xubuntu
• Lubuntu
• Edubuntu
• Ubuntu Studio
• Ubuntu Cinnamon

What About KUbuntu 26.04

KUbuntu 24.04

KUbuntu is not mentioned in the announcement. And, I didn’t see the qualification request for KUbuntu 26.04 in the Technical Board.

The KUbuntu developer, Scarlett Gately Moore, was in a car accident in last July. Though back to work now, she needs a little help.

Rik Mills, another KUbuntu developer who’s also Ubuntu core developer, is actively building packages for Ubuntu 26.04 and backporting Plasma desktop and KDE frameworks for current Ubuntu release through KUbuntu PPAs.

IMO, KDE Plasma is so popular and maintainers are still actively working, there’s no reason to exclude KUbuntu 26.04 as one of the next official LTS flavors.

Why Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Unity Excluded

Ubuntu MATE 24.04

Ubuntu MATE is Ubuntu with MATE desktop environment, a continuation of the classic GNOME 2. It was firstly approved as official flavor when it was in version 15.04.

MATE in current Ubuntu releases is still at version 1.26, while the latest MATE 1.28 has been released for more than a year. Debian upstream has started packaging MATE 1.28 for Forky and Ubuntu 26.04, though Ubuntu MATE developer missed the LTS qualification.

According to the future of Ubuntu MATE discussion, it seems that the project lead, Martin Wimpress, is now having other interests and obligations (Nøughty Linux), so he didn’t apply the re-qualification requests.

For Ubuntu Unity, the official flavor since 22.10, the project lead Rudra Saraswat, is too busy because of university exams and tests.

Other members lack of knowledge to maintain the project, and Maik Adamietz asked for help by this thread in discrouse few months ago, but without luck. And, they didn’t even know the requalification process so missed the deadline for next 26.04 LTS.

For current Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Unity users

Without Ubuntu MATE or Ubuntu Unity, Ubuntu 26.04 can install the 2 desktop environments from the system repositories, though they will be less stable due to lack of desktop specific maintenance.

According to this discourse page, 24.04 users may stay with it until 2034, by enabling Ubuntu Pro for security maintenance, though Canonical does not offer phone or ticket support for Community Flavors.

source https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2025/12/ubuntu-mate-unity-will-not-be-official-ubuntu-26-04-flavors/