The GNOME Project unveiled the beta versions of the GNOME Shell and Mutter components for the forthcoming GNOME 46 desktop environment series, which come with various enhancements.
GNOME Shell 46 beta incorporates enhancements to High Contrast and default styling, the capacity to close mount notifications when the drive is disconnected, keyboard model configuration support, a header for notifications, and spruced up appearance of symbolic icons in notifications.
Moreover, the GNOME Text Editor app is presently included in the dash by default, the minimize animation has been refined, the switch’s appearance was updated, screencast failures handling has been improved, and the dimming effect is now exclusively used for modal dialogs in Activities Overview.
The GNOME Extensions app has received several improvements such as support for adaptive dialogs and the ability to remember the window state. Furthermore, GNOME Shell 46 beta revamps the assets in the monitor layout switcher, rectifies menu alignment in RTL locales, and adds missing shift levels for the Georgian OSK layout.
With the new update, GNOME Shell is set to utilize a single source for all system notifications. A series of bugs have also been taken care of in this beta, resolving issues with the transient effects of Wayland windows, feedback appearance in the keyboard backlight slider, the size of the icon regression in the dash, and the summary transition from search results to session.
On a different note, Mutter 46 beta introduces more preparations for upcoming support for variable refresh rate, carries out mouse cursor hotspots for KMS atomic, overhauls Wayland focus management, and facilitates configuration of XKB models. Additionally, the update permits the activation of the KMS deadline timer after a VT switch if it was inhibited beforehand.
In addition to all of these, Mutter 46 beta also reinstates IM state flushing prior to handling key events, introduces support for the Broadcast RGB/RGB KMS property range, enables the use of the EGL configuration format, handles the Alt modifier in pad actions, as well as providing the capability to store 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 35 mins ago