"Choose a release" section on Downloads page should be clarified

[kumikumi]

Details about the problem

If you are a novice user who is looking to download the Ubuntu Mate release with "latest features", the downloads page is somewhat misleadingly advertising 19.10 as such. Meanwhile 20.04 LTS is advertised as just being stable and suitable for mission critical systems.

Users should be made aware that 20.04 has the latest features and longest support, and the old interim release (19.10) and old LTS (18.04.4) should be made less prominent.

My suggestion:

On top of the Choose a release page there should be (at any time)

• Newest LTS
• Newest interim release, but only if it is newer than newest LTS

Below that there should be "Other releases" section, that has all other currently supported releases listed.

Screenshots

Current downloads page. "I guess I'll pick the one with the latest features"

Link(s) to the affected pages

https://ubuntu-mate.org/download/amd64/

[lah7]

Thanks for the report. Good points - sorry it took a while to get back.

This is a bit of a head scratcher 🤔 since there's pre-releases and architectures/device ports to consider the wording for. Some of the hardware ports only have 19.10 for instance, which is neither supported nor stable.

Right now, the text is shown is determined on whether it's an LTS or interim according to downloads.yml.

I'm thinking to change the download page design, as the current "1-2-3" grid was intended to make it clear between 32-bit and 64-bit PCs as well as suggesting BitTorrent first in efforts to preserve bandwidth. Both of these have become redundant as i386 is reaching end of life and the bandwidth is sponsored.