GNOME Mutter & Shell 43 Beta Bring Several Very Exciting Changes

GNOME's Shell and Mutter components have released their beta versions for this GNOME 43 milestone. Particularly on the Mutter side are some very exciting changes from improvements to direct scan-out, high resolution scroll wheel support being completed and merged, various Wayland improvements, and more performance optimizations.

GNOME Mutter 43 Beta compositor work includes:

- Support for direct scanout on GPUs without buffer modifiers support. This can help some GPUs like older AMD Radeon RX 500 series Polaris cards without modifiers support wired up.

- High resolution scroll wheel support! At last! All the high resolution scroll wheel work in the recent years for Wayland and other components now leads to high resolution scroll wheel support for GNOME on both X.Org and Wayland sessions.

- Support for multi-monitor direct scanout! Up to this point direct scanout only worked for single head display configurations.

- A new tool to pretty print the current display configuration data:

- Dropping mipmap frame-rate limiting and in turn leads to anti-aliasing being consistent during window previews, etc.

- Basic color scheme support for server-side decorations.

- Single pixel buffer support making use of the new Wayland protocol as an optimization.

- Crash and memory leak fixes.

Meanwhile the GNOME Shell 43 Beta offers up:

- The Shell will stop auto-dismissing notifications on focus changes.

- A device switcher is added to the volume sliders.

- Only loading of extensions that support the current session mode.

- Improved overview animation performance.

- Improved app grid navigation.

- Improvements to the on-screen keyboard.

Downloads via GNOME's GitLab. The GNOME 43 beta formal release is due out soon and this also marks the UI / feature / API / ABI freezes. The GNOME 43 release candidate meanwhile comes in early September and the plan is to formally release GNOME 43 on 21 September.