Provenance Record

News article of 763 words (range 400-1200) on a first release of an independent Wayland compositor for MATE plus the mate-panel changes its notes recommend. Clear structure (overview, release contents, comparison with MATE's Wayfire session, listed limits, the two mate-panel changes, what remains unclear). Neutral tone, no AI self-reference, facts and the Herald's own derived figures are labelled. Appropriate hedging: states the Herald did not run either session and that no cited page says a distribution has built a Wayland-enabled panel.

All 9 snapshots read from disk (gunzip + HTML-to-text), none had suspicious_patterns (null in manifest for all 9). source-0 (Polo v1.0.0 release): published 'released this 12 Nov 03:03'; notes begin 'First release.'; contains 'Preferably a MATE panel build that covers this and this.' where the two links in the raw HTML are mate-panel PR 1598 and PR 1599, under the heading 'Recommendations and issues'; also 'Fedora's mate-panel and many other MATE packages are built for X11 only; they need a Wayland-enabled build.', 'GTK 3.24 leaks a little memory per closed window on Wayland', 'Do NOT start magnifier until 1.0.1, the issue is fixed but not on this release yet.', 'Installs its patched libweston 16.0.1 privately under $libdir/polo', Meson/Ninja source-tarball install, 'MATE (Polo)' in LightDM, polo --session compatible with mate-session-manager 1.28's D-Bus API, desktop cube and wobbly windows, layer shell for mate-panel: all confirmed. source-1 (Polo README): 'Polo is a port of Marco's behavior and window management policies to Wayland, built on libweston and written in Vala and C', 'Wayfire wasn't designed for MATE or other DEs, yet we've been trying to make MATE fit into it through plugins, workarounds, and compromises.', 'mate-settings-daemon continues running on XWayland', plugins disabled 'only in the Polo session', 'they continue to use the same GSettings/dconf keys', 'Polo is still under active development', Fedora 44 and Debian 14 / Ubuntu 26.04/26.10 dependency lists, 'GPL-3.0-or-later', 'Tests and Marco Oracle documentation are in progress': all confirmed. source-2 (Linuxiac, Bobby Borisov, 12 Nov 2026, substantive original coverage): 'MATE already has experimental Wayland support through Wayfire' and 'Polo is an independent project, not an officially adopted replacement for MATE's existing Wayland solution.' both verbatim; the headline word 'Independent' therefore reflects this source. source-3 (LWN brief, posted 12 Nov 2026 by jzb): the quote '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.' is on the LWN page (as an excerpt of the announcement, with an elision marker after it) and LWN says Söke is looking for testers 'particularly on multi-monitor setups'; the page is a short restatement of the announcement, as the article says. source-4 (Phoronix): live URL returns 403 to curl with a browser User-Agent; the stored snapshot is the Archive.org capture web.archive.org/web/20261112110153/ (sha256 of uncompressed content c243c4b552db783bfd8dea35dca6126d81e6003c692e934a3ee30b02190e80f3, matches manifest); it reads 'Written by Michael Larabel ... on 12 November 2026 at 05:56 AM EST', 'MATE user Kerem Söke', 'Polo builds off Wayland's Weston library', 'released today': confirmed, and the article correctly labels the stamp as Phoronix's US Eastern time. source-5 (mate-wayland-session README): 'This is a simple and experimental MATE session using Wayfire', 'We now run mate-settings-daemon in native wayland' with 'REQUIRES mate-settings-daemon 1.29.1 or later', and 'GSettings: GNOME, not MATE, gsettings preferences apply for fonts and icon themes under Wayland.': confirmed. The article's description of the two READMEs' different designs is accurate. source-6 (mate-panel v1.29.1 release): 'released this 13 Nov 07:25'; I recounted 'What's Changed' from the raw text and the GitHub API body: 53 entries (New Contributors excluded) and 13 whose titles contain 'Wayland' (#1480, #1514, #1515, #1568, #1573, #1580, #1583, #1582, #1584, #1595, #1598, #1600, #1599; a 14th, #1532, says 'wl-window-list' without the word and is correctly not counted); '[Wayland] Add support for autohide' (#1584) and '[Wayland] Add support for ext-workspace-v1 in pager' (#1568) are verbatim; the release lists #1598 'wayland/tasklist: hide skip-tasklist windows', #1599 'wayland/tasklist: report task button geometry to the compositor' and #1600 'wncklet: Rebuild Wayland tasklist context menu to match Marco's', all by @KeremSoke, so both PRs are in the 1.29.1 changelog and not merely merged before it. source-7 and source-8 (PRs 1598 and 1599): titles, descriptions and 'Merged' state confirm the article's one-line descriptions. GitHub API cross-checks (UTC): PR 1598 created 2026-11-09T21:35:52Z, merged 2026-11-12T22:38:19Z by lukefromdc; PR 1599 created 2026-11-09T21:36:44Z, merged 2026-11-12T22:49:07Z by lukefromdc; PR 1600 created 2026-11-12T18:50:15Z, merged 2026-11-12T22:38:29Z; Polo v1.0.0 published_at 2026-11-12T03:03:24Z (created 03:02:50Z, target main); mate-panel v1.29.1 published_at 2026-11-13T07:25:35Z. The article's whole UTC timeline matches. Headline test: 'Independent' is Linuxiac's wording; 'Brings a libweston Wayland Compositor to MATE' matches the README, Linuxiac (libweston 16), LWN ('a Wayland compositor for the MATE Desktop Environment') and Phoronix ('a new compositor option'); 'Two mate-panel Tasklist Changes Its Notes Prefer' = the two links in Polo's notes, both titled wayland/tasklist; 'Shipped in 1.29.1 on Nov. 13' = mate-panel 1.29.1 published 2026-11-13 07:25 UTC, with both PRs in its changelog. The 145-character headline is compressed and the clause 'Its Notes Prefer Shipped' is a stumble, but the only available reading is that the two mate-panel changes shipped in mate-panel 1.29.1; nothing in it says Polo shipped in mate-panel, the body spells out the chain, and no element is wrong, so this is a style note, not a defect that misleads. Discourse (discourse.ubuntu.com) is not cited or linked in the article. Allowlist: github.com, linuxiac.com, lwn.net and phoronix.com are already on config/source_allowlist.txt; no additions. Anthropic disclosure: not required - neither Anthropic nor an Anthropic product is the subject, in the headline, summary or lead, or in a credit line.

No error found. Claim-accuracy tests: (1) absence/quantifier sentences: 'none of the cited pages reports a position by the MATE project' checked against all 9 snapshots; the PR threads show a MATE-org member (lukefromdc) reviewing and merging the changes and saying he is on Wayfire, not Polo, which is not a position on Polo's status, so the sentence stands; 'Beyond Linuxiac's statement' is correctly attributed. (2) Headline/summary/lead qualifiers kept (independent, notes prefer, 'lists'); actor and object not renamed (KeremSoke opened the PRs, lukefromdc merged them). (3) Dates are UTC-labelled in the body; Phoronix's Eastern stamp is labelled; order of events (opened Nov 9, Polo published Nov 12 03:03, merged Nov 12 22:38 and 22:49, mate-panel published Nov 13 07:25) is correct. (4) Derived figures (53 and 13) recomputed from raw text and labelled 'By the Herald's own count'; vendor figures none. (5) No source disagreement left unreported (the two READMEs' different settings-daemon designs are reported with attribution). (6) Independence: Linuxiac (substantive, independent), Phoronix (independent, archive capture), LWN (independent but a brief restating the announcement, and the article says so) are three distinct outlets; the Polo and mate-panel GitHub pages are primary. Polo is a separate project, not a MATE-official release, which the headline word 'Independent' and the body both convey.

Accurate, well-sourced News article with three independent outlets, a verified UTC timeline and correctly recounted figures; ready for publication as-is. Featured candidacy: 1 - solid release coverage for a defined Linux desktop audience, a first release by a single developer and not an official MATE project