The primary desktop in Ubuntu 23.04 and Fedora 38 is getting there
GNOME 44 is reaching readiness, just in time for inclusion in the next versions of the two big distro daddies, Ubuntu «Lunar Lobster» and Fedora 38.
GNOME 44 reached beta in mid-February and now it’s moved to the next version, 44.rc, or release candidate.
The removal of Gtk 3 support and its replacement with Gtk 4 continues. The last use in Mutter of legacy OpenGL has been removed, leaving only OpenGL ≥ 3.1 and GLES ≥ 2.0, as has the last use of Gtk 3. However, Mutter has gained preliminary support for HDR, or High Dynamic Range. HDR is a feature in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon that we wrote about last week.
There’s now direct support for Wayland’s fractional_scale_v1 protocol. A bug asking for fractional scaling support was opened back in 2016, and it first appeared back around GNOME 3.32, five years ago, but integration continues. This is a good thing as it’s an increasingly important feature, as we talked about when discussing Mutter last year.
