The Last Minute GNOME Shell + Mutter 40 Release Candidate Changes

GNOME developers remain very busy as they approach the finish line for GNOME 40.

In preparing for the GNOME 40 release candidate this week, maintainers have begun tagging their new packages. Released yesterday were the GNOME 40 release candidates for GNOME Shell and Mutter with plenty of noteworthy changes in tow.

The GNOME Shell 40 release candidate is enjoying:

- Improving the app folder appearance.

- Improved workspace handling on secondary monitors.

- Improved interaction when dragging between app grid pages.

- Improved overview performance.

- Many bug fixes.

GNOME Mutter 40 release candidate has:

- Improved refresh rate calculation.

- Wayland presentation-time protocol support.

- Disabling of double-buffered shadow buffering.

- The new headless native back-end.

- Fixing high latency and stalls when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver.

- Only starting XWayland on demand when running under systemd.

- Crash fixes.

- Memory leak fixes, among other bug fixes.

More details on all of the "40.rc" changes in full over on Gitlab. Look for GNOME 40.0 to ship later this month.