14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME Project's Florian Müllner announced the availability of the GNOME Shell 3.25.2 and Mutter 3.25.2 development releases ahead of the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.25.2 desktop environment.
GNOME 3.25.2 is the second milestone in the development cycle of the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment, which is expected to launch later this year on September 13, and it should hit the streets any moment now. Therefore, both the GNOME Shell user interface and Mutter window and composite manager were updated with many changes.
While GNOME Shell 3.25.2 is a small update addressing a bunch of bugs, it also appears to add a few things, such as transparency to top bar when free floating, animation to unmaximize and maximize operations, the ability for search providers to include clipboard text within results, and an optional icon parameter to the PopupMenu.addAction() function. It also reduces its dependency on Caribou.
What's new in Mutter 3.25.2
On the other hand, Mutter 3.25.2 is a bigger update fixing non-Wayland builds, copy/paste operation of UTF-8 strings between the Wayland and X11 display servers, accessible screen coordinates on X11, some glitches that occurred when opening a window maximized, frame updates when changing hide-titlebar-when-maximized, and a few other issues reported lately.
A few things have also been added in Mutter 3.25.2, such as support for the disable-while-typing option, a vfunc plugin to implement a custom "Force Quit" dialog, the ability to emit the size-change signal when tiling, as well as support for computing geometry of clients that don't have it set explicitly. Lastly, it looks like Mutter now uses less CPU power when rendering fast-updating windows.
You can download both Mutter 3.25.2 and GNOME Shell 3.25.2 source tarballs from our website if you want to compile them on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, but please try to keep in mind that these are pre-release versions that shouldn't be installed on production machines. Both components will soon be available as part of the GNOME 3.25.2 desktop environment.