The Latest GNOME Shell/Mutter Performance Work & X11/Wayland Separation

GNOME 3.32 is shaping up to be a darn fine release especially with the performance improvements slated to be part of this six-month desktop environment update due out in March.

In addition to Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt wrangling many performance improvements this cycle throughout the GNOME desktop stack, longtime GNOME developer Georges Stavracas who is currently employed by Endless Computer has also made some nice performance wins.

Stavracas has dropped the ShellGenericContainer class which should lead to more stable frame-rates compared to the current (pre-3.32) state. He also has made improvements to the texture cache with Clutter that may lead to some icons loading faster and also helping out the startup animation performance. There is also some performance work going on around Cogl for CPU-side picking to potentially reduce GPU resource usage.

Aside from performance, in the Mutter space Georges also oversaw getting the Autotools build system dropped in favor of Meson and untangling more X11-specific code from Wayland. He and others have been working on making GNOME code paths less dependent on X11 code sticking around when running on Wayland and it looks like GNOME 3.32 will be better positioned but not necessarily complete in that process.

More details on Georges' latest GNOME contributions via his blog.