The Ubuntu MATE team is pleased to announce the availability of Ubuntu MATE 26.10 Beta, codenamed “Stonking Stingray”. 
This is the first release from the newly gathered UM team, after the project skipped the 26.04 LTS release earlier this year. 
This release has shaped up well and our tests reveal there are no regressions or showstopper bugs. However, we would really appreciate if you try this beta image and report any bugs to improve our final release. You can obtain the image from https://cdimages.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/26.10/beta.
I skipped the ‘New Features’ section, because to be honest, there is not much to list. 
Any and all new features are actually core Ubuntu changes. 
Even with our best efforts, we could not complete upgrade of all of MATE packages to their latest released version. The urgency with which we gathered and worked, the high standard of Debian packaging, overall quality process involved in a release and not to forget the challenges of balancing personal life, all weighed in. Given my personal experience during this release period, my respect for Martin has grown many fold. 
On a positive note, the available packages are stable. Many bugs were fixed by upstream. Some of those fixes have made it to the release and we are planning to backport others after the release.
Known Issues:
-
On the login screen, if we click on the password box, the password-reveal/conceal (
) icon is broken. We have identified the cause and will be fixed soon. LP #2169382. -
During installation, if you choose manual installation, the installer creates the
EFIpartition automatically (and forcefully), even when you have created one manually. However, there is no issue when manually creating other partitions like/boot,/,/homeetc. Workaround is to leave creation of EFI partition to the installer itself and only create other partitions. Tracked here: 1572 -
If you are a visually challenged user, the screen-reader installation has a quirk. On ‘Select your timezone’ slide, you cannot come out of ‘Timezone’ box with a ‘Tab’. It keeps looping and reads timezone info. As a workaround, press ‘Shift+Tab’ twice, to reach ‘Next’ button in reverse direction. From there the installation continues without issue. This affects all flavors using ‘subiquity’ installer. Tracked here: 1571
-
If you are testing on virtual machine, you may see an error pop-up saying, “Sorry, Ubuntu XX.YY has experienced an internal error.”, and if you click on ‘Show details’, it will (mostly) be
/usr/bin/blueman-applet. This is OK, because on systems without bluetooth support (e.g., a vm), there is no/sys/class/bluetoothdirectory. This is a condition check and hence the failure. Of course, the error can be handled in a better way, instead of crashing. We will work on it. -
In live-session, ‘redshift’ may not work. This is because, the location service (geoclue) has either not started or failed to start. There is no issue on an installed system (vm or bare-metal) as tested.
Other Changes:
There are some changes that may affect some UM users who rely on scripting and automation 
. If you are using any of the following packages, please check and adjust accordingly.
-
We have migrated to
dracutfrominitramfs-tools. While theupdate-initramfs -ucommand still works, some specific options that you used may not be available any more. -
We have dropped
ifupdownand embracednetplanfully. This had to be done becauseifupdownwas failing to bring ethernet devices in live-session (due to deprecateddhclientbeing hard-coded). This also means, there will be nopppoeconfpackage which pulls-inifupdown. -
Latest version of
gdebiis broken. It fails when we click on ‘Install’ and enter password. Instead of shipping it in non-functional state, we decided to drop it from the iso. We will work on the bug.
Common Release Notes
As Ubuntu MATE is based on Ubuntu Desktop, please also check the Ubuntu Release Notes for more common issues and bugs affecting all Ubuntu flavors.
Support
Ubuntu MATE 26.10 is a standard release (non-LTS) and will be supported for 9 months, until July 2027.