GNOME Shell & Mutter 44 Release Candidates Bring Last Minute Changes

The GNOME Shell and Mutter release candidates ahead of this month's GNOME 44 desktop update are now available for testing.

GNOME 44.rc as the release candidate desktop is due out this week ahead of the official GNOME 44.0 debut in two weeks. With the GNOME Shell 44 release candidate some of the last minute changes include no longer using GTK for the system tray support and getting rid of GTK use in most of the compositor process. There is also a memory leak fix and various other fixes.

The GNOME Mutter 44 release candidate changes are a bit heavier and include changes such as:

- Removing legacy OpenGL driver support.

- Dropping the last remnants of GTK3 use.

- Restoring the zero-copy fast path for XWayland full-screen windows like full-screen games.

- Experimental option for exposing HDR modes.

- Implementing the Wayland fractional scale protocol.

- Improving the default scale factor selection.

- Managing kernel mode-setting (KMS) updates more asynchronously.

- Removing support for window shading.

- Fixing partial updates on offscreen rotated screens.

- Improving XWayland RandR emulation compatibility.

- Fixing XWayland focus regressions.

- Various crash fixes along with other random fixes.

Meanwhile not making it for the GNOME 44 cycle is the long out-of-tree work led by Canonical/Ubuntu for the triple buffering optimization.