The headline changes in MATE Desktop 1.28 are:

• Atril now uses libarchive for handling comics, supports webkitgtk 4.2.1, and has documented its EPUB support. Deprecated methods have been replaced with modern counterparts to improve performance and stability.
• Caja can now manage desktop icons, render backgrounds, and change backgrounds in Wayland sessions. These improvements enhance the user experience and bring greater functionality to Wayland users.
• Engrampa has introduced support for the Meson build system, switched to using unar for CPIO archives, and now supports unrar-free. These updates improve compatibility and performance.
• The Eye of MATE image viewer now supports the Meson build system and includes fixes for several build warnings, contributing to a more stable and efficient application.
• The window manager Marco has added a new setting to raise windows on the alt+tab popup and replaced various deprecated methods to ensure better performance and user experience.
• Many panel applets now support Wayland, with improvements for in-process building and specific applet functionality under Wayland. Memory leaks have been fixed, and accessibility improvements have been made.
• The control center now works in both Wayland and X11 sessions, supports the Meson build system, and includes several UI and memory leak fixes.
• Pluma has a new Quickhighlight Plugin in the pluma-plugins package.
• MATE Terminal now has Meson build system support. Copying a file from Caja into the terminal now works as expected (it inserts the file path). Additional enhancements include support for OSC 8 hyperlinks and improvements to tab management.
• Translations are updated. Thank you to our team of translators!

mate-wayland-session

• An experimental Wayland session for MATE using Wayfire. First release version.

Complete changelog at https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-wayland-session/commits/master/