The “48.alpha” releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter were tagged on Sunday for this week’s release of the GNOME 48 Alpha in leading up to the GNOME 48.0 stable release in mid-March.
The GNOME Shell 48 Alpha release brings better accuracy of inset box shadows and other UI rendering/presentation fixes, showing OSD notifications for headphone connection, various accessibility improvements, sysext support to toolbox tooling, modernized spinner, and introduces the notion of screen time / health breaks.
Yes, GNOME Shell can now remind you around breaks from screen time for health reasons. More details for those curious about that via this merge request. There is also support for screen time limits.
There is also this design doc as part of the GNOME user “digital well being” effort.
GNOME Shell 48 Alpha is rounded out by various bug fixes, including crash fixes. More details on the GNOME Shell 48 Alpha changes via this commit.
Over on the Mutter 48 Alpha side, there is improved color management support, improved detecting deferred primary devices, fixing explicit sync for virtual monitors without PipeWire streams, avoiding CPU talls with NVIDIA secondary GPUs that are directly attached to displays, support for the Wayland system bell protocol, pipeline hooks to user program pipelines, high priority KMS threads, built-in RenderDoc support, fixing touchscreen drag-and-drop on XWayland, xdg-toplevel-drag-v1 Wayland protocol support, high priority secondary EGL contexts, wp_viewport support, Wayland timing and queuing protocols, improved cursor scaling for Wine Wayland use, and a variety of other Wayland compositor enhancements and general improvements. More details on all of the Mutter 48 Alpha changes via this commit.
