GNOME Shell & Mutter 46 RC Brings Modifier-Aware Screencasting, VRR & X.Org Sync Fix

In preparation for the GNOME 46 release candidate, the "46.rc" versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter were published this morning. The release candidate work is mostly about fixing outstanding issues but there are also some lingering fixes that made it into these releases.

Most notably is the experimental Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support that was merged on Saturday after obtaining a feature freeze exception. The GNOME 46 desktop thus will be able to leverage the experimental VRR support with capable Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync displays!

Also exciting with the Mutter 46.rc release is unifying Wayland pointer and keyboard grab mechanisms, modifier-aware screencasting, fixing a synchronization issue under the X.Org environment, sending fractional scaling events immediately on window creation, and then a lot of bug fixes and other changes.

The unifying of Wayland pointer and keyboard grabs should fix various drag-and-drop issues, dismissing popups with tablets and touch if clicking outside the app will now work, and other "longstanding bugs" under Wayland should be cleared. The modifier-aware screencasting support meanwhile now enables DMA-BUF screencasting support on NVIDIA hardware.

More details on the Mutter 46.rc changes via this commit.

Also released minutes ago was the GNOME Shell 46 release candidate. The GNOME Shell 46.rc fixes repainting the drawing area, supporting locking down the extension installation, notification improvements, on-screen keyboard improvements, support for using H.264 encoding for screencasts if available, working around an issue with NetworkManager's WireGuard support, a crash fix, and various other bug fixes and code clean-ups.

The GNOME Shell 46.rc changes are outlined here. The GNOME 46 release candidate will formally be announced in the coming days. The GNOME 46.0 stable release is expected on 20 March.