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The GNOME Project released today the beta versions of the GNOME Shell and Mutter components as part of the upcoming GNOME 46 desktop environment series and they’re packed with lots of improvements.
GNOME Shell 46 beta delivers improvements to High Contrast and default styling, support for closing mount notifications when the drive gets disconnected, keyboard model configuration support, header for notifications, and improved appearance of symbolic icons in notifications.
In addition, the GNOME Text Editor app is now featured on the dash by default, minimize animation has been improved, the switch’s appearance was tweaked, the handling of screencast failures was improved, and the dimming effect was kept for modal dialogs in the Activities Overview.
The GNOME Extensions app received a couple of improvements like support for adaptive dialogs and the ability to remember the window state. Moreover, GNOME Shell 46 beta overhauls the assets in the monitor layout switcher, fixes menu alignment in RTL locales, and adds missing shift levels for the Georgian OSK layout.
With this release, GNOME Shell will now use a single source for all system notifications. Various bugs were addressed as well in this beta, including effects of transient Wayland windows, feedback look in the keyboard backlight slider, icon size regression in the dash, and overview transition from search results to session.
On the other hand, Mutter 46 beta adds more preparations for upcoming variable refresh rate support, implements mouse cursor hotspots for KMS atomic on all virtualized drivers for kernels where
mouse cursor hotspots are in DRM core.
Mutter 46 beta also refactors Wayland focus management, allows configuration of XKB models for those with a custom keyboard layout or irregular keyboards, and enables KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) deadline timer after a VT switch if it was inhibited.
Furthermore, Mutter 46 beta restores IM state flushing before handling key events, adds support for the Broadcast RGB/RGB range KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) property, adds support for the EGL configuration format, adds support for handling Alt modifier in pad actions, and adds support for storing eraser and stylus tools separately.
Last but not least, the beta release of Mutter 46 implements direct scanout for cropped and scaled surfaces, fixes lost keyboard focus after dismissing pop-ups, fixes handling of pad ring wrap-arounds, swaps stylus buttons to match traditional order, and fixes centering of non-modal transients over the parent.
Both GNOME Shell and Mutter 46 beta releases received documentation improvements. They will be available for public testing shortly as part of the soon-to-be-released GNOME 46 beta desktop environment, or you can download them separately from here and here.
Last updated 3 months ago
