GNOME Shell + Mutter 43 Alpha Released

In gearing up for the GNOME 43 Alpha release coming out soon, this weekend marked the release of the new alpha versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter.

For the "43.alpha" state, the GNOME Shell and Mutter changes aren't too great in terms of shiny new features but there is a lot of fixes and other refinements. Some of the changes for the new GNOME Shell and Mutter alpha releases are outlined below.

GNOME 43 Alpha brings:

- Improving GNOME Shell's high-contrast CSS stylesheet.

- Showing of WireGuard connections in the VPN list.

- Fixing on-screen keyboard gestures.

- Focus tracking has been fixed for the magnifier tool on Wayland.

- Mirroring GTK's API in GNOME Shell for a convenience property for icon-only buttons.

- Memory leak fixes and a variety of other fixes.

More details on the GNOME 43 Alpha changes via this commit.

GNOME Mutter 43 Alpha introduces:

- Direct scanout handling improvements.

- Removal of obsolete Wayland protocols.

- Night light handling fixes.

- Fixing initialization of privacy mode for supported displays.

- Support for HDR and Colorimetry CTA-861 EDID extension blocks... Parsing the HDR extension block is important for the long-going quest of proper HDR support on the Linux desktop.

- Various crash fixes as well as memory leak fixes.

More details on the GNOME Mutter 43 Alpha changes via this commit.

The GNOME 43 Alpha release will be out soon while the GNOME 43 Beta is coming in early August that will mark the UI and feature freeze along with the API/ABI freeze. The GNOME 43 release candidate in turn will come in early September and the GNOME 43.0 stable release is expected to happen on 21 September.