Ubuntu MATE lead Martin Wimpress steps down and seeks a successor after 12 years

After over a decade of leadership, Wimpress cites a lack of time and passion as he looks for new maintainers to save the official Ubuntu flavor.

The maintainer of Ubuntu MATE, Martin Wimpress, has started the search for new people to maintain the project after 12 years. Wimpress, whom you may remember from the Ubuntu Podcast several years ago, has said he now lacks time to work on Ubuntu MATE, and even if he did have the time, he no longer has the passion for the project that he had when he began the work.

For those that don’t know, Canonical maintains its standard version of Ubuntu, and then community members maintain spins, essentially working for free. Some of these spins are more official than others, with Ubuntu MATE becoming an official flavor in 2015. In 2016, it released its first long-term support release.

When Canonical shifted to the Unity Desktop away from GNOME 2, many people were not happy. Ubuntu MATE was born out of this desire to be able to continue using GNOME 2 technologies and continue their development. Obviously, computer hardware has come a very long way in the last 12 years, making modern iterations of GNOME easy to run. GNOME has also become much more usable compared to the early days of GNOME 3, and there are distributions like Linux Mint MATE that offer users a solid choice of operating systems

While there is a distinct possibility that Ubuntu MATE dies with Wimpress stepping away, hope isn’t lost yet, as he is looking for anyone who might be interested in taking over the project, provided they have the time and energy to do so. Managing an operating system requires a lot of work and is not something that can be vibe-coded in a few hours.

To maintain Ubuntu MATE, you would need to be an Ubuntu contributor with experience maintaining packages in the Ubuntu archive.

One of the first things that something was wrong was at the start of December when Canonical released a list of flavors that would be getting an LTS release in 2026. Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Unity were two projects that didn’t apply to release an LTS this year, suggesting Wimpress has been wanting to leave the project for at least months at this point.

Let us know in the comments if you use Ubuntu MATE. If the project is discontinued, what will you be switching to?

Source: Ubuntu Discourse and Ubuntu Lists via OMG! Ubuntu!

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 30 March 2026 at 5:42 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

RIP Matrix