GNOME Mutter 46 Beta A Win For Gamers & VM Users, Other Last Minute Changes Too
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While the notable feature work is now wrapped up this weekend, the "46.beta" releases bring some exciting last minute work. GNOME Mutter 46 Beta delivers on:
- Mouse cursor hotspots for KMS atomic mode. This change allows for atomic kernel mode-setting on virtualized drivers to deal with cases before where it's been a problem for virtualized drivers within VMs to avoid having to use the legacy DRM KMS code.
- Refactoring of Wayland focus management so that Wayland keyboard focus management behaves similarly to X11 within the Mutter code.
- Drops the experimental RT-scheduler feature. This is being dropped since they now have a dedicated KMS thread and it enables real-time scheduling unconditionally.
- Supporting the Broadcast RGB/RGB range KMS property to workaround broken sinks.
- Direct scanout of cropped and scaled surfaces is now supported. This in turn allows for games to "almost always" hit direct scanouts in full-screen mode even when fractional scaling is used or other non-native resolutions. This also enhances video playback performance in various scenarios too.
But not found in the Mutter 46 Beta is the dynamic triple buffering work long pursued by Canonical / Ubuntu. The Mutter Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support also was not merged ahead of the GNOME 46 freezes. A list of the GNOME Mutter 46 Beta changes can be found via this commit.
GNOME Shell 46 Beta delivers on:
- Improved high contrast styling.
- Improved default styles.
- The GNOME Text Editor is now added to the dash by default.
- Improved handling of screencast failures.
- Improved minimize animation.
Plus various other changes as outlined via this GNOME Shell commit.
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