GNOME Shell & Mutter Prepare For GNOME 42 Beta With More Desktop Enhancements

GNOME Shell and Mutter have issued their "42.beta" releases ahead of next month's GNOME 42.0 stable release.

Building off the many changes in GNOME 42 Alpha, there is yet more notable improvements to find with the beta releases that were tagged today. GNOME Shell 42 Beta provides:

- An in-shell screenshot and screencasting user-interface.

- A redesign to the GNOME Shell on-screen display (OSD) elements.

- Fading of the screen when transitioning between light and dark modes.

- Support for GNOME's new "high contrast" setting.

- Support for dark wallpapers.

- A redesign to the GNOME Shell Extensions.

- GNOME Shell now does away with the rounded top bar corners.

- Overhauling the GNOME Shell stylesheet.

- Support for Swiss French and Swiss German on-screen keyboard layouts.

- Many bug fixes.

The full list of 42.beta highlights via this commit.

Meanwhile today's GNOME's Mutter 42 Beta release adds:

- Improved XWayland auto-termination handling.

- DRM privacy screen support with the new Linux interfaces exposed on modern kernels.

- Support for changing the monitor configuration policy.

- DMA-BUF support is now advertised for PipeWire.

- The file descriptor limit of the Wayland compositor has been raised.

- DMA-BUF buffer screencasting is no longer limited to use just on the Intel graphics driver.

- A new Clutter grab API.

- Various bug fixes, including crash fixes.

More details on the Mutter 42.beta changes via this commit.