Polo 1.0 debuts as MATE desktop's native Wayland compositor

Polo 1.0 has released as a new Wayland compositor specifically designed for the MATE desktop environment, which forked from GNOME 2 and has historically relied on X11 with the Marco window manager. The project, developed by Kerem Söke, builds on Wayland's Weston reference compositor library while reimplementing Marco's window management policies, settings, and theme support to maintain behavioral parity with the existing X11 experience.

Polo includes XWayland compatibility for running legacy X11 applications, and revives classic visual effects including the desktop cube and wobbly windows that were popular in the Compiz era. This represents a significant modernization path for MATE, which has lacked a native Wayland compositor despite broader desktop ecosystem migration away from X11.

Architecture and compatibility model

• Weston-based foundation: Polo builds on Wayland's official Weston compositor library rather than starting from scratch, inheriting core protocol handling and rendering infrastructure.
• Marco policy porting: The compositor adopts window management policies, settings schemas, and theme integration from Marco, MATE's existing X11 window manager derived from GNOME 2's Metacity.
• XWayland integration: Polo ships with support for XWayland to run unmodified X11 applications within the Wayland session, addressing the application compatibility gap during transition.
• Legacy effects implementation: Visual features from the GNOME 2/Compiz era including desktop cube and wobbly windows are implemented natively in the Wayland context.
• Behavioral preservation focus: Explicit design goal is maintaining the same user-facing behavior and feel as MATE on X11, reducing migration friction for existing users.

Why it matters

MATE has been one of the last major desktop environments without a dedicated Wayland migration path, leaving users dependent on X11 as distributions increasingly default to Wayland sessions. Polo provides a concrete modernization route that respects MATE's conservative user base by preserving familiar interaction patterns rather than forcing adoption of a fundamentally different compositor like Sway or Hyprland. For Linux distributions shipping MATE, particularly Ubuntu MATE and Fedora's MATE spin, this enables future-proofing their desktop offerings without fragmenting the user experience or maintaining parallel X11 infrastructure indefinitely.