People are used to see Ubuntu MATE versions show up at the same time with other official Ubuntu flavors, but they forget that it's not an official flavor just yet. That's about to change in a couple of days.

Ubuntu MATE developers have been releasing the same versions for their distro as the official flavors for some time now and they even got on board the LTS train, even if they didn't have to. They have filed the necessary paperwork to become an official flavor, but it can take a while. Well, it looks like they finally got the approval and Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1 is poised to be the first official release.

A formal announcement regarding this development hasn't been made just yet, but one of the makers of Ubuntu MATE left an interesting and "straightforward" announcement on Google+. It sounds a little big vague, but it has some of the clues that indicate what he's trying to say.

Ubuntu MATE is moving fast

One of the things that really stand out with Ubuntu MATE is the speed of the developers. They implement a huge amount of changes and each of their releases surpasses the previous one. Unlike Ubuntu, which has been rather static for the past couple of editions (Canonical has good reasons for that), the MATE flavor is bustling with action and it brings new features all the time.

"Something, something official build. Mumble, mumble cdimage. Blah, blah, early days, not the finished article. Hushed tones QA tracker. Possibly Beta 1 tomorrow, perhaps. Rumours about fastest transition from first build to beta ever..." wrote Martin Wimpress on Google+.

The first Beta for the Ubuntu 15.04 flavors is expected to arrive on February 26, which is just a couple of days away. We'll have a screenshot tour ready and more details when the release is made.