GNOME 3.34 Beta 2 Brings Last Minute Improvements To GNOME Shell, Mutter & Friends

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 21 August 2019 at 09:08 PM EDT. 8 Comments
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Coming two weeks after the GNOME 3.34 beta is the second and final beta ahead of next month's official GNOME 3.34 release set for 11 September.

While past the feature/API/ABI freezes, there are some notable last-minute changes to find with the GNOME 3.34 Beta 2 (GNOME 3.33.91). Highlights include:

- Fixes to the Epiphany web browser for regressions stemming from its many changes this cycle.

- GDM has added support for systemd user sessions. There are also various other fixes.

- GJS has support for writing programs using GTK4 now that it no longer links to libgtk-3.

- GNOME Boxes has improvements around the unattended installation code, Flatpak/CI build fixes, and other changes.

- GNOME Screenshot has Flatpak improvements, support for saving both to the disk and to the clipboard via the CLI switches, and other fixes.

- GNOME Session also has support now for systemd user sessions.

- GTK-VNC 1.0 is included.

More details within the release announcement.

GNOME Shell and Mutter are also out today with their new beta releases albeit missed the cut-off for making it formally as part of this new GNOME beta release. On that front for these key components there is:

- GNOME Shell has picked up the gnome-extensions tool as a replacement to the out-of-tree gnome-shell-extensions-tool. This new gnome-extensions is a CLI tool for managing the extensions in use by the desktop.

- Mutter has fixed primary selection copy and paste between X11 and Wayland.

- Improved monitor hot-plugging support.

- A performance optimization from Daniel Van Vugt for helping to avoid some frame skips. There is also an improvement by Daniel for processing of incompressible events.

- XDG-Output V3 is now supported for Mutter on Wayland.

- The XWayland sudo improvement for Mutter.

Overall, GNOME 3.34 is looking like a really great release particularly for Wayland users and those also caring about better desktop performance.
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