GNOME's Mutter Makes Another Step Towards X11-Less, Starting XWayland On-Demand

GNOME 3.34 feature development continues at full-speed with a lot of interesting activity this cycle particularly on the Mutter front. On top of the performance/lag/stuttering improvements, today Mutter saw the merging of the "X11 excision" preparation patches.

The Mutter patches by longtime GNOME developer Carlos Garnacho around preparing for X11 excision were merged minutes ago. This code is various refactoring and thanks to other already-merged efforts should be enough to start GNOME Shell with the --no-x11 command-line argument to be able to launch without the X11/X.Org support and being able to initiate XWayland on-demand when needed.

As part of this refactoring was the splitting up of the XWayland initialization code and changing around of different X11 and Wayland bits. This is just the long list of Mutter improvements queuing up for GNOME 3.34 due out in September.