I bumped into this article this morning. I’m not disabling my ad blocker. It’s not quite a one-click disable with pfBlockerNG. lol
Anyone else read this? Is it accurate?
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The core technical facts in the article are actually accurate but the headline overdramatizes the situation. The author is correct that Ubuntu MATE 26.04 LTS missed its release window due to a severe shortage of active maintainers after the lead developer stepped down, leaving community build fixes unreviewed and the project without enough manpower to hit the LTS release milestones. Because the current 25.10 release hits End of Life (EOL) in July 2026, running it unpatched after that date poses a legitimate security risk for production environments. However, the upgrade path itself isn’t broken since the flavor still shares the official Ubuntu repositories so affected users wouldn’t need a fresh reinstall because they can simply do a standard release upgrade to the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS base and pull the desktop package using
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y && sudo apt install update-manager-core -y && sudo do-release-upgrade -d && sudo apt install ubuntu-mate-desktop -y
To keep the existing MATE environment and layouts completely intact. So while the maintainer shortage created a real release bottleneck, it’s a straightforward migration path rather than an infrastructure crisis and definitely not worth changing those pfBlockerNG rules over.
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