GNOME's Mutter 40 Alpha Released With Big Improvements

[skeevy420]

This log is mainly the same as the one for gnome-shell && mutter 3.38.2
But there are some really interesting things in development, especially on the gnome userland side.

I think people will love Gnome 40.

Except for the name. We're gonna give 'em hell for skipping 38 versions

But it is looking to be a nice release.

[JackLilhammers]

Except for the name. We're gonna give 'em hell for skipping 38 versions

But it is looking to be a nice release.

That's not true.
They skipped just 36

[144Hz]

Wikis just suck. They tend to expand until maintainability is lost. This happened here as well.

[scottishduck]

Would have made more sense for GNOME 40 to be when they adopt GTK4, no?

[144Hz]

scottishduck No. The versioning was changed to avoid the GTK3 vs GTK4 discussion.

GTK4 porting will happen gradually. The shell extension preferences might go GTK4 very soon.

[ix900]

Wikis just suck. They tend to expand until maintainability is lost. This happened here as well.

So... just like everything else. Go figure.

[144Hz]

ix900 Fully agree.

[Vistaus]

Would have made more sense for GNOME 40 to be when they adopt GTK4, no?

IMHO, yes. But that line of thinking in Linux was dropped ever since KDE decided to split Plasma, Frameworks and Applications into different version numbers.

[You-]

Except for the name. We're gonna give 'em hell for skipping 38 versions

When the naming discussions happened, it was noted that the next release is actual Gnome's 41st release. It was pragmatically too late at that stage to rename 3.38 to gnome 40. Next release being 41 would have been odd especially as the normal next release would have been 3.40.

They have skipped -1 releases!

[You-]

Would have made more sense for GNOME 40 to be when they adopt GTK4, no?

They wanted to avoid exactly this and the implied major breaking changes. They want an incremental updates model where even big updates are broken down and adopted with less breakage.

However, GTK is aiming for a release in december and it seems pretty on target. So that is when GTK 4 will be adopted.

However in the new fangled world, there is not a need for every single core app to be ported on the same release and GTK4 is designed to be parallel installable.