The MATE Desktop may exist with one foot intentionally in the past, but that doesn’t mean its fans don’t have eyes on the future – which is going to include Wayland.
Polo is a new Wayland compositor for MATE modelled on the desktop’s existing X11-based window manager Marco (which was forked from GNOME’s Metacity a long time ago).
“The idea is to keep MATE behaving as closely as possible to how it does on X11, rather than changing the desktop to fit a different compositor”, says Kerem Söke, who is building Polo independently of the MATE project.
Made using libweston, Polo already supports window management and tiling, workspaces, clipboard, multiple monitor setups, scaling, screen sharing and MATE session management.
It even includes classic desktop effects, like the iconic 3D desktop cube, wobbly-windows and window minimising effects like the Magic Lamp.
It’s not complete, or well tested. As such, Söke is looking for volunteers to try it on their hardware, and with the apps they use day-to-day. Testing is not a trivial task, sadly. Polo needs to be compiled from source, ideally with the latest MATE desktop too.
Many Linux desktops have dropped or are dripping support for the legacy X11/Xorg display server, after supporting both for years. For smaller desktops with older code bases and fewer volunteers, migrating to Wayland is a tall order.
MATE’s developers are prepping for Wayland. Recent release have added Wayland support added to apps like Atril and Pluma, while Caja desktop icons render. The work is in dribs and drabs, and often only there if built with the right flags.
There is no official MATE compositor or Wayland session yet. While this isn’t official right now, if it was to work, and work well, there’s nothing to say it couldn’t be adopted.
Find the code and more details on the Polo GitHub page.