While the GNOME 46 desktop is being released next week, one of the very last minute feature items being merged hit the Mutter codebase on Friday.
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1,259 GNOME open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
The GNOME 46 release candidate was officially rolled out today as the last chance to test the GNOME 46 desktop software ahead of its stable release later this month.
Not only have KDE developers been very busy this week but so has the GNOME crew working toward the GNOME 46 release later this month as well as working on various other improvements to land past the 46 cycle.
The upcoming GTK 4.14 toolkit release with the new renderers should yield crisper font rendering.
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.
It's happened! After three years in the making, the GNOME desktop Variable Refresh Rate "VRR" support has been merged after obtaining a feature freeze exception for GNOME 46 due out later in March.
The long in-development work for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support plumbed into GNOME's Mutter compositor might still make it for the GNOME 46 desktop release due out this month. It's still being treated as an experimental feature at this point but a feature freeze exception is being sought to allow its inclusion this release rather than waiting for GNOME 47 in the autumn.
The GNOME Prompt terminal emulator in-development by Christian Hergert with a focus on GPU-acceleration and being a very speedy and beautiful terminal option has been renamed to Ptyxis.
GNOME developers remain quite busy with various new initiatives thanks to their funding from their Sovereign Tech Fund. There's some screencasting enhancements still on deck for GNOME 46, various GNOME accessibility improvements forthcoming, and also ongoing work around systemd-homed home directory encryption support.
WebKitGTK as the port of the WebKit rendering engine used by GNOME Web (Epipahny) and other software for displaying web content is transitioning to using Skia for its 2D rendering.
The GNOME 46 beta is out today for featuring the latest fixes and last-minute enhancements to this open-source desktop environment update due out in March.
A merge request was opened this week for plumbing fractional scaling support for XWayland clients running on the GNOME Mutter compositor.
GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor today issued their GNOME 46 Beta releases with some notable changes ahead of the API/ABI and feature freezes for the GNOME 46 desktop due for release in March.
Today marks the UI, feature, and API/ABI freezes for the GNOME 46 desktop ahead of its stable release on 16 March. One feature coming down to the wire that looks like it may not make it -- unfortunately -- is the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) integration.
The GNOME project has announced the GNOME Project Handbook as a new resource for helping new developers/contributors get involved with this open-source desktop environment.
GTK recently merged their new "unified" rendering code with a focus on Vulkan API support and where Linux distributions are now encouraged to build with the Vulkan renderer. Prominent GTK developer Mathias Clasen at Red Hat has written more over the weekend about the state and future of the new Vulkan and NGL renderers.
There's been some new work pending for further enhancing the GNOME desktop when it comes around Variable Rate Refresh (VRR). Separately, there's new merge requests pending for adding laptop battery charge threshold controls from the GNOME UI.
GNOME Network Displays is the software that allows streaming your GNOME desktop to WiFi Display devices using PipeWire. Last week GNOME Network Displays 0.91 was released with some big improvements to this software.
While back in December the GNOME dynamic triple buffering was self-proclaimed to be "ready to merge", so far that hasn't happened yet. With the GNOME 46 feature freeze scheduled for 10 February, it remains to be seen if this long-worked-on dynamic triple/double buffering will be ready in time for this six month release. In any event, this past week saw a new optimization queued for this code.
Last week I wrote about GTK landing their new unified GPU renderer and as part of that the Vulkan API support is set to be enabled by default. Linux distribution vendors are being encouraged moving forward to indeed ship with the GTK Vulkan support enabled, so we'll be seeing more Vulkan API use on the Linux desktop with OpenGL slowly fading away.
If you happen to be impacted by snow storms today or otherwise have extra time on your hands this weekend, GNOME 46 Alpha is now available for testing this latest desktop environment that will be going head-to-head with KDE Plasma 6.0 later this quarter.
There's been much work recently on a new unified renderer for the GTK toolkit. Yesterday a merge request was opened and already merged that enables Vulkan by default.
In preparing for the GNOME 46 Alpha release, this morning the "46.alpha" builds of GNOME Shell and Mutter were published.
After the merge request was open since August of 2022, merged today is support within the GNOME Remote Desktop code for handling graphical remote log-ins.
For the GNOME desktop among the technologies that will hopefully mature into good shape this year are high dynamic range (HDR) display support as well as variable refresh rate (VRR). When it comes to the VRR support there's been more Mutter progress made in this effort.
A few months back GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted that Linux terminal emulators could be much faster following his experiments but then concluded at the time he didn't want to develop a new terminal becase "creating your own terminal is like 20 lines of code these days." Well, he ended up shifting stance a bit and has now announced Prompt, a new container-focused terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop.
With the recent €1M in funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME developers remain quite busy working on improving the accessibility and security of the GNOME desktop.
It looks like GNOME 46 might finally see the dynamic triple buffering support merged for Mutter to enhance the performance particularly for systems with integrated graphics.
GNOME Shell has merged a set of 35 patches to fix/improve icon and text scaling support, especially when using the Large Text mode for accessibility.
While the winter holidays are approaching so far it hasn't led to any reduced effort in the GNOME camp. In fact, fresh off the €1M in funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, there are several new exciting initiatives moving forward along with other ongoing enhancements driven by GNOME developers.
The GNOME GTK toolkit is introducing support for graphics offloading within the toolkit. This new GTK "GraphicsOffload" support is Wayland-only at this time and not working either for non-Linux platforms.
As part of the effort to make GNOME Terminal and the VTE terminal emulator library render faster, the GNOME Terminal has been seeing more work lately in being ported over to using the GTK 4 toolkit. Additionally, the VTE terminal library has been working to overcome its long-standing 40 FPS rendering cap.
Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt has been working on enabling zero-copy support for discrete GPUs within GNOME's Mutter compositor to deliver faster performance. This appears to be working so far with the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver.
Back in September GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted how Linux terminal emulators have the potential of being much faster based on his experiments. While at the time he didn't plan to pursue it further, in the weeks since he's been making enhancements to GNOME's VTE code that is used by GNOME Console and other apps.
The GNOME Foundation has named a new Executive Director for overseeing the foundation responsible for this leading open-source desktop environment.
Daniel van Vugt of Canonical's desktop team for Ubuntu Linux has been on a spree recently tackling various GNOME bugs -- often performance issues -- while also continuing to work on the dynamic triple buffering support and other GNOME desktop enhancements. His latest discovery is around finding another performance bottleneck for multi-GPU setups.
A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment.
GNOME developer Christian Hergert recently demonstrated how Linux terminal emulators have the potential of running much faster. At the time it didn't sound like he would pursue the matter further but more recently he's begun working on folding some performance improvements into GNOME's VTE for a faster terminal experience.
A newly-opened merge request for GNOME's Mutter compositor adds hardware acceleration for the NVIDIA proprietary driver for secondary GPUs such as in the case of hybrid systems and other setups with multiple monitors whereby the NVIDIA GPU with proprietary driver is powering some of those outputs.
GNOME 45 released last week and while it has many interesting desktop improvements, a feature still not found upstream is the Canonical-led work on dynamic triple buffering for Mutter.
Prominent GNOME developer Christian Hergert announced he created a new terminal emulator that is twice as fast as the closest GPU-based renderer he's found yet so far on Linux, which was Alacritty. Unfortunately though he currently doesn't have any plans to develop this experimental speedy terminal emulator any further.
GNOME 45 is out as stable today as the latest six-month update to this open-source desktop environment that will be powering the likes of Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora Workstation 39.
The GNOME 45 release candidate is now available for testing ahead of the desktop's stable release later this month.
The release candidates were tagged this morning of GNOME Shell and Mutter ahead of the "GNOME 45.rc" test release coming out within the next few days. With the release candidates are some last-minute changes worth mentioning.
In addition to GNOME's Sysprof integrating CPU scheduler data this week for GNOME 45, this system-wide profiling tool has also added support for FlameGraphs.
GNOME's Sysprof is a wonderful system-wide profiling tool for helping developers analyze bottlenecks and debug other challenging issues. This system profiler has covered both kernel and user-space but to date has not provided any insight around the CPU scheduler behavior and thus developers have had to resort to other tooling there. But for the GNOME 45 release, Sysprof has integrated CPU scheduler details.
The GNOME 45 Beta is out today as the latest development milestone ahead of its stable debut in September.
The GNOME 45 Beta release is imminent and this morning the "45.beta" milestones were tagged for the GNOME Shell and Mutter components.
Recently merged to GNOME's Mutter compositor development code is implementing a dedicated kernel mode-setting (KMS) thread and allows for pointer motions to bypass the main thread during cursor sprite movements. Ultimately this effort is around lower-latency cursor movements.
Tagged on Saturday was GTK 4.12 as the newest version of this open-source toolkit.
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