A new Wayland compositor called Polo has reached its first public release, offering MATE Desktop users another way to run their familiar desktop environment without X11.
MATE already has experimental Wayland support through Wayfire, but Polo takes a different approach. Instead of adapting a general-purpose compositor through plugins and workarounds, it is designed specifically around MATE’s existing architecture, recreating the behavior of MATE’s traditional Marco window manager while replacing its X11 foundations with Wayland.
Built using C, Vala, and libweston 16, Polo combines a Wayland compositor, window manager, and session manager into one project. It supports familiar features such as Alt+Tab window switching, window tiling through keyboard shortcuts or dragging, multiple workspaces, and traditional window menus.
Existing X11 applications remain supported through XWayland, while users can continue using their current Marco settings through GSettings and dconf. Polo also includes visual effects like wobbly windows, a desktop cube, and animations for minimizing and maximizing windows.
Beyond window management, Polo handles much of the desktop session itself. It provides functionality normally associated with mate-session-manager, including application autostart, saved sessions, logout and shutdown dialogs, and power management.
Multi-monitor configurations are supported as well, including display hotplugging, saved screen layouts, gamma adjustments, and output zoom. Screenshot capture and screen sharing are available through xdg-desktop-portal, while layer-shell support allows components such as mate-panel to work with the compositor.
However, Polo is still under active development, and some parts of MATE have yet to make the transition to Wayland. For example, mate-settings-daemon continues to run through XWayland, with plugins incompatible with Wayland disabled during Polo sessions.
The developer also notes that several MATE packages distributed by Fedora, including mate-panel, are currently built with X11-only support and require Wayland-enabled builds.
For those interested in trying it, the project’s GitHub repository provides source code and build instructions for Fedora 44/45, Debian 14, and Ubuntu 26.04/26.10. Once installed, users can select the new “MATE (Polo)” session from the LightDM login screen.
For additional background on the project, see the developer’s announcement on Ubuntu Discourse.
Finally, it is worth clarifying that Polo is an independent project, not an officially adopted replacement for MATE’s existing Wayland solution.
