GNOME News Archives

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.

GNOME 46 or later will likely be seeing work to overhaul the default window management behavior of the desktop.

The GTK toolkit and GLib support for Apple's macOS may be taking a back-seat to other platforms moving forward and would fall into a "best effort" category.

It's already time for the first alpha release of the in-development GNOME 45 desktop.

Merged this week into the GNOME Mutter compositor codebase is what should be a beneficial optimization for those enjoying Linux gaming under the GNOME Wayland session.

It's been one month already since the debut of GNOME 44 and out today is the first point release.

Following this week's Qt 6.5 LTS and Slint 1.0 Rust toolkit, debuting today is GTK 4.11.1 as the first development release of the new toolkit series in leading up to GTK 4.12.

While WebKitGTK already provides accelerated compositing support, there are different code paths depending upon whether Wayland or X11 are used and various other complexities involved as well as differences between using the GTK3 and GTK4 toolkits. WebKitGTK developers have been working to instead shift their multiple different code paths toward one route by way of DMA-BUF.

GNOME 44 is now officially out as the latest half-year update to this widely-used open-source desktop.

The GNOME 44 release candidate was officially declared today as the last test version ahead of formally releasing the GNOME 44 desktop later this month.

The GNOME Shell and Mutter release candidates ahead of this month's GNOME 44 desktop update are now available for testing.

While GNOME 3.32 saw initial work on fractional scaling support for the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor, the upcoming GNOME 44 release is bringing support for Wayland's fractional_scale_v1 protocol.

Yesterday saw GNOME Shell and Mutter drop the last of their GTK3 dependence while today there is another interesting change to mention on the Mutter compositor side... An experimental option for enabling some HDR modes with supported high dynamic range displays.

The GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor have completed their migration off GTK3.

The Clutter OpenGL "Cogl" code within the GNOME Mutter compositor has removed legacy OpenGL driver support ahead of next month's GNOME 44 release.

For the past few years Ubuntu developer Daniel van Vugt at Canonical has been working on dynamic triple buffering support for the GNOME desktop so that it will switch from double to triple buffering when the GPU is running behind in order to ultimately ramp up the GPU clock speeds / performance state in order to get back to delivering a fluid desktop experience. These triple buffering patches still haven't been upstreamed as of the GNOME 44 release due out next month, but the patches continue to be carried within Debian and Ubuntu among other distributions. An updated version of the code is now on the way to Debian and for April's Ubuntu 23.04 release.

It's GNOME 44 Beta week and today marked the tagging of the beta updates for the GNOME Shell and Mutter.

A ten month old merge request to GNOME's Mutter for adding implicit grabbing to the Clutter code was finally merged last week.

A new GTK blog post summarized a recent meet-up of GTK core developers for better sorting out active GTK4 work as well as some planning toward GTK5.

A pending change to the GNOME Shell will make it easier to monitor running background applications that otherwise are not visually presented currently on the desktop.

For over two years Canonical has been working on dynamic triple buffering for the GNOME desktop with the Mutter compositor. This triple-buffering-when-needed can dramatically boost the desktop performance especially in cases like Intel integrated graphics and Raspberry Pi boards. The triple buffering work hasn't been upstreamed yet but the hope is that it may finally be ready for upstream inclusion with GNOME 44.

GNOME's Mutter now allows disabling XWayland support at build-time if so desired. This is part of the broader GNOME effort for making X11 support optional and ultimately allowing for a modern Wayland-only environment if so desired and without carrying legacy X11 cruft.

Earlier this year AMD-Xilinx announced a Linux-powered robotics starter kit making use of Xilinx's Kria KR26 SOM featuring a Zynq Ultrascale+ with four Cortex-A53 cores and Mali graphics. While robotics focused, there is a DisplayPort output and over the summer Canonical has been working to get this board playing nicely with a Wayland-powered GNOME desktop.

GNOME 43 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source desktop environment used by Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu, and many other Linux distributions.

The release candidates are out today for the GNOME Shell and Mutter updates ahead of this month's GNOME 43 desktop debut.

Earlier this summer was the patch series for GNOME's Mutter to make use of the Linux DRM/KMS "max BPC" property for the drivers exposing the maximum bits per color supported. That code has now been merged in time for next month's GNOME 43 release and in turn will help deal with some scenarios where users may encounter screen flickering, brief blackouts, and other problems related to available monitor bandwidth.

For the past decade going back to the early GTK3 days there has been the "Broadway" back-end that allows for GTK interfaces to be rendered within HTML5 web browsers. Aside from demos and other toys, there hasn't been too much widespread use reported with this GTK HTML5 back-end and some distributions like Ubuntu and Debian haven't been shipping the Broadway support with the newer GTK4. However, that is changing now for Debian and with this autumn's release of Ubuntu 22.10.

The beta of GNOME 43 is now available for testing ahead of the stable release next month.

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.

Going back years has been an effort to get 30-bit deep color support on the GNOME desktop under Wayland. Ubuntu and others have been interested in getting 30-bit color support working nicely for the Linux desktop, but while that milestone hasn't yet been crossed, thankfully there is some renewed work in that direction.

GNOME and Red Hat developers are working on integrating firmware security tips and recommendations into the desktop for warning users about platform/firmware security issues like if UEFI Secure Boot is disabled and other possible avenues their system could be exploited.

Released this morning was the alpha of the GNOME 43 desktop.

Canonical engineer Daniel van Vugt who is known for his work on enhancing the upstream GNOME desktop stack to improve the experience for Ubuntu has recently taken up interest in getting the AMD-Xilinx Kria KR260 working with the GNOME Wayland session. The Kria KR260 is for the recently-announced AMD/Xilinx Robotics Starter Kit.

GNOME Builder as the desktop's integrated development environment (IDE) is the latest software project to be ported to the GTK 4 toolkit.

In gearing up for the GNOME 43 Alpha release coming out soon, this weekend marked the release of the new alpha versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter.

While GTK4 is still in its early stages and it will presumably be some years before "GTK5" even begins to take shape, GNOME developers are already thinking of ditching X11 support for that next major GTK release -- effectively making it Wayland-only on Linux.

One of the multi-year efforts in the GNOME Wayland camp has been on deep color support and it's been of interest to Ubuntu developers among other parties. After not hearing about any progress on GNOME Wayland deep color support in a while, some progress is now being made.

GNOME developers are working on supporting the Linux KMS "Max BPC" connector property that is supported by some of the Direct Rendering Manager drivers for limiting the maximum bits per color permitted. In turn properly supporting this setting can take care of monitor issues seen on some systems where the monitor may randomly flicker or have other issues unless otherwise lowering the refresh rate or resolution.

Variable rate refresh (VRR / FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync) support for GNOME's Mutter compositor is closer to being merged. The native back-end support for VRR that has been in development the past two years is no longer considered a work-in-progress and it's believed there are no longer any blocking issues that would prevent this code from landing.

GNOME's Mutter compositor has been going through some code restructuring and preparations for being able to build it without any X11 dependencies at all, for those wanting a legacy-free/X11-free GNOME desktop experience that would also forego any XWayland support.

NetworkManager 1.38 is now available for this widely-used software on the Linux desktop (and elsewhere) for managing wired and wireless network interfaces.

GNOME developer Chris Davis has laid out plans for at least some of the work items he and other open-source developers hope to accomplish for GNOME 43 and future releases.

GNOME 42 is out today as the latest half-year update for this widely-used, open-source desktop environment.