There is two weeks to go until the GNOME 50 stable release while out today is the release candidate of Mutter 50. This Mutter 50.rc release brings some exciting last-minute enhancements to this Wayland compositor.

Mutter 50.rc brings great improvements for the NVIDIA R590 Linux driver usage, SDR-Native color mode support, various high dynamic range (HDR) improvements, screen sharing improvements, and more. The Mutter 50.rc highlights include:

- Unblocking the NVIDIA performance. Various performance improvements when using NVIDIA graphics with the official NVIDIA Linux driver thanks to various workarounds. The [1]merge notes: " Using Nvidia-580, this reduces the time spent blocked per frame from milliseconds to microseconds. "

[2]

- Using FBOs for secondary GPU rendering rather than EGL surfaces. This helps out the NVIDIA driver too while not hurting other drivers and results in less code too. With the NVIDIA driver this allows for 10 bits per color scanout buffers.

- HDR screen sharing support.

- [3]SDR-Native color mode support was merged for wide color gamut displays.

- [4]Wayland color management v2 protocol support .

- Making wp_commit_timing with Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.

- Disabling tone mapping with HDR.

- Fixing direct scanout when using software cursors.

- DevKit now has clipboard integration and multi-monitor support.

- Crash fixes and memory leak fixes.

More details on today's Mutter 50.rc release via [5]GitHub .

Also out today is [6]GNOME Shell 50.rc with various fixes and improved support for logind inhibitors in system actions.



[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/4725

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2026&image=mutter_50_nvidia_lrg

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-50-Mutter-sdr-native

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-50-Color-Management-v2

[5] https://github.com/GNOME/mutter/commit/d38893c5fde8c101f61302e9070d019118575423

[6] https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-shell/commit/2326d8ee7b49db59b7ccaa0393b66f78075a6972