Adding to the excitement for this September’s GNOME 49 release is introducing the Mutter SDK.
Nearly four years in the making, the merge request by Jonas Ådahl introduces a new way of running and interacting with Mutter and GNOME Shell. Ådahl explains of the Mutter SDK:
“This merge request adds a new way of running and interacting with mutter (and gnome-shell) by adding two things:
– A “viewer” that connects to the mutter instance of the session and creates a virtual monitor which it then sends input to.
– A “sdk” argument to mutter that launches this viewer when one passes –sdk to mutter or gnome-shell.The viewer currently only uses the remote desktop and screen cast APIs and require nothing else, except an addition to the screen cast API where one can add new monitors without starting new sessions. What would probably be useful, however, is an org.gnome.Mutter.Sdk D-Bus API which one can use to control certain things. A MetaSdk object is introduced which is instantiated when passing –sdk which can probably learn more things, e.g. introspecting Wayland/X11 displays, and doing other things.”
In basic form the Mutter SDK allows the ability to present a new output as an added virtual monitor in a Mutter instance within the same D-Bus session.
After refinements over the past nearly four years (August 2021) and more than 160 comments during the code review, the Mutter SDK code was merged todsy with 18 patches to Mutter Git.
