The release candidates were tagged this morning of GNOME Shell and Mutter ahead of the "GNOME 45.rc" test release coming out within the next few days. With the release candidates are some last-minute changes worth mentioning.

GNOME 45 is getting ready for release later this month while the Mutter 45.rc has some last minute changes worth noting. Among these GNOME Mutter 45.rc changes are:

- Support for alpha-composited window screencasts.

- Fixing some XWayland windows not being mapped.

- Fixing cursor movement on rotated screens.

- Implemented suspended xdg_toplevel state.

- Support for the Wayland idle_inhibit protocol.

- Adding the Meta Toolkit Library (MTK). The Meta Toolkit Library is a low-level library containing common and shared types between meta, Clutter, and Cogl. In turn this helps reduce the usage of Cairo within Mutter.

- Improving support for input capture and emulated input handling.

- Various crash fixes and other bug fixes.

More details on the Mutter 45 release candidate changes via this commit .

New changes to GNOME Shell with the 45.rc release candidate include:

- Allowing the ability to dismiss notifications with the backspace key.

- Fixing three-finger swipes on touchscreens.

- Many bug fixes and other GNOME Shell extension work.

Details on those changes here .

GNOME 45.0 is due for release on 20 September and will be found in the likes of Fedora Workstation 39 and Ubuntu 23.10 this autumn.