14 DAY TRIAL // We reported last week that the first milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, due for release on March 22, 2017, arrived for early adopters, but the changes weren't all that significant.
A few days after the announcement for GNOME 3.23.1, the GNOME Shell 3.23.1 graphical interface and Mutter 3.23.1 window and composite manager made their appearance on the official FTP server, and looking at their changelogs, attached at the end of the article for reference, it appears there are plenty of new features to get excited for.
We'll start with GNOME Shell 3.23.1 by telling you that the promised dual-GPU integration we talked about last week, and which will land in the upcoming Fedora 25 Linux operating system, due for release on November 15, 2016, has been added in the form of a right-click context menu item for launching apps with the discrete video card.
Additionally, GNOME Shell now refreshes the Wi-Fi list while it's open, improves the display of PAM messages on the login screen, automatically updates the background animations when resuming your computer from suspend, and implements a reload option to the gnome-shell-extension-tool component.
Mutter 3.23.1 fixes bugs with Wayland, improves pointer constraints support
On the other hand, Mutter 3.23.1 fixes a couple of bugs for the next-gen Wayland display server, such as various placement issues and crashes reported by users since Mutter 3.22.1, implements a fallback mechanism that causes Mutter to use X11 with certain hybrid graphics configurations, and improves pointer constraints support.
The mirror mode should now work correctly with stage views, the Escape shortcut is now properly handled in the Force Quit dialog, and makes the session to no longer enter idle mode immediately after startup. Multiple other small bugs have been resolved as well, so check out the changelog below for more details.
To test GNOME Shell 3.23.1 and Mutter 3.23.1 on your testing machine, you'll need to install the GNOME 3.23.1 desktop environment using the jhbuild modulesets located at http://library.gnome.org/devel/jhbuild/ and http://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/3.23.1/. You can also download the GNOME Shell 3.23.1 and Mutter 3.23.1 sources from our website.