GNOME Shell & Mutter

The GNOME Shell user interface has mostly seen minor refinements and quality of life updates in recent cycles, but on the design side we’ve explored a lot of longer-term things we’d like to do.

GNOME Kiosk, the lightweight, specialized compositor continues to evolve In GNOME 50 by adding new configuration options and improving accessibility.

GNOME Kiosk is a separate Wayland compositor built on the same core components as GNOME Shell, such as Mutter.

Focus stealing prevention exists for two main reasons: One is security, since we need to prevent rogue apps from deceiving users into e.g. typing their password into another window.

One of the things we’re tackling as part of the STF infrastructure initiative is improving notifications.

By now it is probably no longer news to many: GNOME Shell moved from GJS’ own custom imports system to standard JavaScript modules (ESM).

TL;DR: The gnome-shell-sass repository is no longer getting updated upstream.

Co-authored by Sebastian Wick & Jonas Ådahl.

On Wayland, a surface is the basic primitive used to build what users refer to as a “window”.

Automated testing is important to ensure software continues to behave as it is intended and it’s part of more or less all modern software projects, including GNOME Shell and many of the dependencies it builds upon.