GNOME Shell & Mutter 46 Alpha Released

In preparing for the GNOME 46 Alpha release, this morning the "46.alpha" builds of GNOME Shell and Mutter were published.

GNOME 46 is getting ready for release in March and as such the alpha release is being prepared to facilitate early testing of this in-development desktop environment. GNOME 46 is all the more important with it appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Fedora 40 this spring.

The GNOME 46 Alpha release is imminent while the GNOME 46 Beta is coming by mid-February. The release candidate will be out in early March and then GNOME 46.0 should officially debut on 20 March.

GNOME Mutter 46 Alpha delivers:

- More profiling instrumentation has been added for helping to uncover performance bottlenecks.

- Simplified X11 focus management.

- Wayland shared memory YCbCr support.

- Improved tablet pressure curve calculation.

- Many Wayland fixes and improvements.

- Many fixes from a vsync regression to direct scanout not working during integer scaling to other crash fixes.

The full list of Mutter 46 Alpha changes here.

GNOME Shell meanwhile delivers on:

- Improved icon and text scaling.

- Fixing a performance problem due to repeated signal leak.

- Optimized application search.

- Improved monitor on-screen display (OSD) labels.

- Improved high contrast styling.

- Modernize the Extensions app.

- Various improvements for GNOME Shell extensions.

- Crash fixes and other bug fixes.

The full list of GNOME Shell 46 Alpha changes can be found here.