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

[scottishduck]

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

[ix900]

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

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

[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.

[curfew]

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.

...and less hopes up and expectations are a big portion of the desktop will probably remain GTK 3 for some time.

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.

Especially on Wayland there are already issues with interoperability between desktop environments. With the use of two separate toolkits, there will surely be interoperability issues between Gnome apps, too. Although there always have been issues between legacy (generic) GTK apps and Gnome anyways...

[oiaohm]

Especially on Wayland there are already issues with interoperability between desktop environments.

That problem is true under X11 before Wayland even started. Interoperability between desktop environments have been a on going nightmare. Wine has a lot of quirks to deal with different clipboard handling and other things from different X11 DE and Windows managers.

[curfew]

Interoperability is not worth it.

Generally speaking you're about right, but then there are those few standalone apps that you have no alternative for such as Gimp and Firefox.

Especially Gimp on Gnome is a fucking pain as Gnome has no support for "open in alternative app"(*), so the only practical way to open an image file in Gimp is to drag 'n' drop it... Except that DnD on Wayland does not work with Gimp. So then you have to open Gimp, choose "Open file..." and navigate back to the folder using the file chooser dialog. Jesus christ!

(*) While such option does exist in the context menu, it will always permanently re-configure the default app for that file type and therefore is useless. I only want to open one photo in Gimp, not set it as the permanent default application for JPEG files... (And for PNGs the default remains the old one, creating an incoherent mess.)