GNOME Shell 2.31.2 Brings Exciting Changes Too

A few hours ago there was the release of Mutter 2.31.2 and there were several interesting changes (particularly theme and performance enhancements) for this compositing window manager that's replacing Metacity in the GNOME 3.0 desktop. With the release of GNOME 2.31.2 (a GNOME 3.0 development snapshot) set for release this week, a new release of GNOME Shell has emerged.

The GNOME Shell 2.31.2 also boasts some interesting changes, including a magnifier option being added for accessibility reasons (though it may find uses for general purposes too), the GNOME Shell clock is now configurable, IM notifications within the message tray now use Telepathy and support in-line messaging, a performance event log that tracks events has been added to the GNOME Shell Performance Framework, an initial application menu has been added to the top panel, many interface enhancements, many Shell Toolkit enhancements, and quite a few bug/build fixes.

The GNOME Shell 2.31.2 release announcement can be found on the GNOME mailing list. Like the Mutter update and most other GNOME 2.31 development packages, GNOME Shell 2.31.2 is also being built with GNOME's GSEAL macro for checking GTK+3 compatibility. This is also going to be the last GNOME Shell release that can be built with GNOME 2.30 libraries where as future releases will depend upon the GNOME 2.31 / GNOME 3.0 development libraries.