MATLAB Deps Docker Images Default to Unsupported Ubuntu Versions for Older MATLAB Releases

[smuckati1]

Using non-latest version of MATLAB - Simulink fails to start when building MATLAB Docker images based on mathworks/matlab-deps. This is because the default base matlab-deps image may correspond to an unsupported Linux distribution for their MATLAB release.

On Docker Hub, matlab-deps images act as the base layer from which customers install MATLAB and selected products. Customers typically specify a MATLAB release tag (for example, R2022b) and rely on the default behavior to pull a compatible operating system image.
However, we have recently published matlab-deps images for unsupported Ubuntu versions for certain MATLAB releases. For example:

• MATLAB R2022b officially supports Ubuntu 22.04 or earlier
• Despite this, a matlab-deps:R2022b image exists for Ubuntu 24.04
• The default R2022b tag currently resolves to Ubuntu 24.04, which is not an officially supported OS for that MATLAB release
  As a result, customers unknowingly build containers on top of an unsupported OS, assuming that matlab-deps tags are guaranteed to be compatible with the specified MATLAB release.

Proposed Solution
Realign matlab-deps Docker images strictly with MathWorks' official OS support matrix by auditing each MATLAB release to identify its supported Ubuntu versions, publishing matlab-deps images only for those supported OS versions, and ensuring that the default release tag (for example, matlab-deps:R2022b) resolves to the latest supported Ubuntu version rather than the latest available Ubuntu overall.

[s32147]

Seeing similar issues since the release of 2025B. Despite being unsupported, there are still many programs that rely on the older versions of these images.