GNOME Shell + Mutter Had A Busy November With Some Big Performance Optimizations

The GNOME developers were particularly busy last month with various improvements to GNOME Shell and Mutter for increasing the usability of the desktop and optimizing its performance / power-savings.

The GNOME Shell Developer Blog has put out their list of notable changes that landed over the last month. Highlights include:

- Fixes to the GNOME Shell authentication dialog.

- Work to remove the libcroco CSS parsing library from the GNOME Shell.

- App Grid improvements, which have also been now back-ported to the 3.34 series.

- GNOME Shell now respects the system font.

- Mutter now supports updating multiple regions independently for its regional clipping support for updating the selected areas of the screen with damage / changed contents. This support can lead to reductions in time to submit frames by up to 44%.

- Mutter's shadow buffer handling to increase performance.

- A fix to avoid full window redraws when using DMA-BUF or EGLImage buffers on Wayland as another power and performance optimization.

- An XWayland full-screen games workaround regarding RandR handling.

More details on these changes and more via blogs.gnome.org.