GNOME Team Announces GNOME 3.38 Release Bringing Various Improvements to Mutter

The team in charge the development of the popular desktop environment "Gnome" has released that for the last two months they have been working at forced marches and that "As the release freeze approached, part of the merge request queue needed a final decision on whether or not they were ready" for the next GNOME 3.38 release.

But finally made a blog post in which they share the most relevant of the work that they have been doing for the next version of Gnome 3.38 that is almost around the corner.

And is that according to the team, Back in the days when Clutter was a toolkit application, only had to process a single frame clock. However, since is now a set of compositing tools, having a watch with only one frame has become a limiting aspect of Clutter, since each monitor sometimes works at different rhythms and times.

On the other hand the team recalled that applications such as games, media players, etc.  They allow its operation in full screen mode.

Ideally, when an application is in full screen mode, you should be able to avoid unnecessary desktop layout when the only thing visible is the client's full screen window.

This is commonly known as "composer bypass" or "full screen not redirected". In GNOME 3.38, the team made Mutter now support bypassing the composer whenever possible.

By skipping the composer, the contents of the window are displayed directly on the screen, without any unnecessary composition. Results vary from hardware to hardware, but in principle this should reduce CPU and GPU usage and therefore improve performance.

Another group of screencasting enhancements came to Mutter. In fact, the team believes that screencasting now works fine, even in cases where an application bypasses the composer.

In the latter cases, Mutter copies the content of the application directly into the screencast. Additionally, the window stream has undergone a number of bug fixes and improvements.

Also the team notes that there has been a big change in GNOME 3.38: the ability to customize the app grid. This feature has been a long-time wish, but it required a number of under-hood improvements and other changes to support it. It currently allows you to create folders by dragging app icons on top of each other, moving apps to and from folders, and repositioning apps on the grid. But that is not all.

The dialogues have also seen minor visual improvements to accommodate these new changes.

While for the calendar menu has also undergone some improvements visuals. Calendar events are now displayed below the actual calendar and the sections are no longer visible. Other improvements have been made to this menu, but they are queued for the next version.

Besides that now various environment components are optionally integrated with the parental controls service which is part of GNOME 3.38. This allows parents, guardians, supervisors, schools, etc. limit which applications a particular user can access.

Finally in the post, they also mention that:

  • The shutdown menu has been split and that the 'Restart' option is now an entry, along with 'Shutdown'.
  • The app's grid layout algorithm has been rewritten and should improve the icon layout in different scenarios.
  • The number of rows and columns is now set based on the screen format and available space, and the icons grow and shrink accordingly.
  • The number of icons per page is fixed at 24 icons. This limit has been set, because changing the number of icons per page runs the risk of losing the customizations made in the application grid.

Source: https://blogs.gnome.org


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