GNOME Shell & Mutter See "47.alpha" Releases With Many Big Changes

GNOME 47 Alpha is approaching in the coming days and on Sunday evening the "47.alpha" versions were declared for GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor. This alpha milestone is a big one with seeing enhanced VR headset support, the ability to build Wayland-only desktop environments, GNOME Shell accent color integration, and other Wayland improvements.

As part of planning toward releasing GNOME 47 on 18 September, it's time to christen the GNOME 47 Alpha (47.alpha) packages. GNOME Shell and Mutter saw their "47.alpha" versions tagged on Sunday evening with many changes in tow.

With GNOME Shell 47 Alpha some of the prominent changes include:

- Support for accent colors is now implemented.

- On-screen keyboard fixes.

- The GNOME Shell overview spacing is now dynamic to better handle different monitor sizes/layouts.

- Support for three or more fingers for touchpad gestures.

- Along with the Mutter changes, GNOME Shell can now be built for a pure Wayland environment without X11/XWayland dependencies if so desired to remove the legacy X11 support.

- Bug fixes and other clean-ups.

More details on the GNOME Shell 47 Alpha changes via this commit.

Meanwhile the Mutter 47 Alpha brings:

- XDG dialog protocol support.

- Support for building without X11 (or XWayland) support.

- Improved monitor matching when restoring windows on a hot-plugged display.

- Fixes hardware-accelerated rendering when running on a headless display setup.

- Fixing hardware cursor support within non-atomic kernel mode-setting (KMS) display drivers.

- Fixing performance problems when having a second virtual monitor.

- Restored support for legacy X11 cursor themes.

- Support for the DRM lease protocol to enhance the VR headset support.

- Many bug fixes -- including crash fixes -- and other enhancements.

More details on the Mutter 47 Alpha changes via this commit.