I have to admit that every time I have to write about this official flavor, something inside me pulls me to at least do some testing with it. It's where I ended up when Ubuntu moved to Unity, and I think I stayed on MATE until I had a slightly more powerful computer. But the news of us yesterday is that Ubuntu MATE 24.10 Oracular Oriole was released officially.
As for what's new in Ubuntu MATE 24.10, not too many. It has been kept at MATE 1.26 because, while preparing MATE 1.28, several bugs and regressions were found. They were not able to fix it in time, so they stayed at the previous series. What follows is the list with changes — or not — that have arrived alongside Ubuntu MATE 24.10 Oracular Oriole.
What's new in Ubuntu MATE 24.10
- Supported for 9 months, until July 2025.
- Linux 6.11.
- MATE 1.26.2. This version of the desktop is exactly the same as the one we found in 24.04, a non-change forced by the bugs found in 1.28.
- Slick Greeter has been reinstated, replacing Arctica Greeter, due to a race condition in the boot process that resulted in the monitor manager failing to start. Reverting to Slick Greeter reintroduces the ability to easily configure the login screen using a graphical application.
- The Ubuntu MATE 24.10 ISO has been reduced from 4.1GB of the previous version to 3.3GB, thanks to some fixes in the installer.
- Applications updated to new versions, including but not limited to:
- Libre Office 24.8.2.
- Firefox 131.
- Celluloid 0.27.
- Evolution 3.54.
- APT 3.0, with new image.
- Open SSL 3.3.
- systemd v256.5.
- Netplan v1.1.
- OpenJDK 21 by default, but OpenJDK 23 available as an option.
- .NET 9.
- GCC 14.2.
- binutils 2.43.1.
- glubc 2.40.
- Python 3.12.7.
- LLVM 19.
- Rust 1.80.
- golang 1.23.
Ubuntu MATE 24.10 It is now available, and can be downloaded from the following button. In case it fails, its official page is ubuntu-mate.org. Updates from the same operating system will be activated in the next few hours/days.