The MATE Desktop Is Becoming Quite Usable On Wayland Via Mir

The MATE desktop environment is becoming usable on Wayland thanks to its support being provided by the Mir display stack.

The MATE desktop, which continues to be developed as an active fork of GNOME 2, is seeing Wayland support thanks to Mir doing the heavy lifting. This is also becoming one of the leading examples of Mir's use-case following Canonical engineers re-tooling their display server with Wayland support after pulling back from their original design goals around Ubuntu Touch and mobile/convergence.

Canonical's William Wold, who has been working on Mir since joining at the start of 2018, has shared a video of the latest MATE bits on action with Wayland thanks to Mir:

They have made it easy to try out with a Snap via sudo snap install --classic --edge mate-wayland and then launching with mate-wayland.