The GNOME developers are always hard at work patching bugs in the popular desktop environment used by default in many GNU/Linux operating systems, and today they've updated the GNOME Shell and Mutter components.

These are among the most important elements of the GNOME desktop environment, and it looks like the GNOME Shell user interface is now at version 3.20.3, fixing a memory leak that was also patched in the GNOME Shell 3.21.3 development release, and adding better handling of VPN (Virtual Private Network) service aliases in networkAgent.

Moreover, the sorting of hidden applications in the app switcher should now work a lot better, and the screen recorder utility won't crash anymore when used under the Wayland display server. Then, the support for Nvidia graphics cards has been improved by allocating framebuffers early when the system starts, and the keyboard shortcuts for cycle-group and cycle-windows actions have been fixed.

Mutter 3.20.3 brings better Wayland support

On the other hand, the 3.20.3 update of the Mutter window and compositing manager improves the copy/paste interaction between the X11 and Wayland display servers. Moreover, it adds better support for multi-monitor setups when used on Wayland, re-implements the missing frame border around GTK+ dialogs, and fixes an issue with the window position on Wayland when attempting to unmaximize using drag and drop.

Additionally, Mutter can now grab random keys for disabled keyboard shortcuts, no longer generates invalid UTF-8 window description strings, can convert wm_class and window titles to UTF-8 encoding, as well as avoid full window redraws when the extended frame sync is in use. Also, it is now possible to use the kill() function to terminate unresponsive Wayland clients.

Download GNOME Shell 3.20.3 and Mutter 3.20.3 right now via our website, but please note that these are only the sources, which you'll need to compile (recommended only for advanced users). The rest of the world should wait for the maintainers of their GNU/Linux distributions to update the GNOME Shell and Mutter packages to version 3.20.3, which should happen in the next few days (already available in Arch Linux).