Last Minute Shell & Mutter Changes Ready For Testing Ahead Of GNOME 3.34

GNOME Shell and Mutter today saw their v3.33.92 releases as their second and final release candidates ahead of next week's GNOME 3.34 stable release. While usually things are very quiet at this stage, there have been some prominent last minute performance fixes.

GNOME Shell 3.33.92 has fixed support for restarting the shell in the systemd user session, a new feature itself of the 3.33/3.34 cycle. There are also various mostly mundane bug fixes.

The exciting last minute work is on the Mutter front with its 3.33.92 release. On the Mutter window manager / compositor front is geometric picking to help lower CPU usage, a NVIDIA performance fix by dropping the GLX threaded swap wait usage, restoring the inhibit shortcut for the overlay key, various pointer a11y improvements, dropping of an earlier faulty performance optimization, more Sysprof trace points are added, a fix for lost keyboard focus following drag-and-drop, and a wide variety of other fixes.

I'm certainly stoked for next week's GNOME 3.34 desktop update for the performance fixes/optimizations and also Wayland support improvements. Stay tuned for our GNOME 3.34 feature overview shortly.