GNOME's Variable Refresh Rate "VRR" Support Continues Coming Together

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.

For the first This Week In GNOME of 2024, it was brought up that developer Dor Askayo has joined the team working on Variable Refresh Rate support in Mutter. This is being done as part of the Sovereign Tech Fund with the GNOME Foundation last year receiving €1M to advance various efforts.

The Mutter VRR pull request lists the current state of the feature as:

"There are a few small design decisions to make, but overall the core VRR experience is quite good in my tests.
Setting the variable-refresh-rate experimental feature is required to enable the feature, followed by a restart of the session (log out and back in)."

The VRR support still needs more testing with clients using Wayland's presentation-time protocol, there are known issues with lower refresh rate for non-throttled OpenGL applications, cursor movement suttering when passively updating fullscreen clients, and missing Wayland protocol support around VRR. In any event, the GNOME VRR support is coming along and hopefully this year we'll see it in a nice and mature form.

GNOME has also been working on Bluetooth improvements, continued refactoring of the GNOME Online Account code, text-to-speech enhancements, and other app improvements.