GNOME Shell & Mutter 45 Betas Released

The GNOME 45 Beta release is imminent and this morning the "45.beta" milestones were tagged for the GNOME Shell and Mutter components.

GNOME 45.0 is working its way toward release on 20 September. With this GNOME 45 Beta milestone, the UI freeze / feature freeze / and API/ABI freeze are applied for the GNOME 45 release. With the 45 beta milestone there are many improvements and new features in store for the GNOME Shell desktop and Mutter compositor.

GNOME Shell 45 Beta brings changes such as:

- Extensions are loaded as modules.

- Porting to EcmaScript modules.

- A camera indicator has been added to GNOME Shell.

- A keyboard backlight quick toggle is new.

- Improvements to the GNOME Shell light style variant.

More details on the GNOME Shell 45 Beta changes via this commit.

Meanwhile the Mutter 45 Beta highlights include:

- Support for input capture and emulated input using the libei emulated input library.

- A dedicated KMS thread is added to help with lower input latency.

- Improved render time estimates.

- Fixing a flickering situation when a DRI driver isn't available.

- Support for YUV formats.

- Fixing the handling of the XWayland byte swapped X11 clients support setting.

- Various bug fixes and clean-ups.

More details on the Mutter 45 Beta changes via this commit.

With the freezes upon us, it looks like GNOME 45 will be still missing out on the dynamic triple buffering support that is currently carried by Ubuntu and Debian. Following the GNOME 45 beta release, the GNOME 45 release candidate will be out in the early days of September.