GNOME Mutter 46 Beta A Win For Gamers & VM Users, Other Last Minute Changes Too

GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor today issued their GNOME 46 Beta releases with some notable changes ahead of the API/ABI and feature freezes for the GNOME 46 desktop due for release in March.

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.