Some personal highlights:
Emoji OSK
The reworked OSK was featured a couple of cycles ago, but a notable thing that was still missing from the design reference was emoji input.
No more, sitting in a branch as of yet:
This UI feeds from the same emoji list than GtkEmojiChooser, and applies the same categorization/grouping, all the additional variants to an emoji are available as a popover. There’s also a (less catchy) keypad UI in place, ultimately hooked to applications through the GtkInputPurpose.
I do expect this to be in place for 3.32 for the Wayland session.
X11 vs Wayland
Ever since the wayland work started on mutter, there’s been ideas and talks about how mutter “core” should become detached of X11 code. It has been a long and slow process, every design decision has been directed towards this goal, we leaped forward on 2017 GSOC, and eg. Georges sums up some of his own recent work in this area.
For me it started with a “Hey, I think we are not that far off” comment in #gnome-shell earlier this cycle. Famous last words. After rewriting several, many, seemingly unrelated subsystems, and shuffling things here and there, and there we are to a point where gnome-shell might run with --no-x11 set. A little push more and we will be able to launch mutter as a pure wayland compositor that just spawns Xwayland on demand.
What’s after that? It’s certainly an important milestone but by no means we are done here. Also, gnome-settings-daemon consists for the most part X11 clients, which spoils the fun by requiring Xwayland very early in a real session, guess what’s next!
At the moment about 80% of the patches have been merged. I cannot assure at this point will all be in place for 3.32, but 3.34 most surely. But here’s a small yet extreme proof of work:
Performance
It’s been nice to see some of the performance improvements I did last cycle being finally merged. Some notable ones, like that one that stopped triggering full surface redraws on every surface invalidation. Also managed to get some blocking operations out of the main loop, which should fix many of the seemingly random stalls some people were seeing.
Those are already in 3.31.x, with many other nice fixes in this area from Georges, Daniel Van Vugt et al.
Fosdem
As a minor note, I will be attending Fosdem and the GTK+ Hackfest happening right after. Feel free to say hi or find Wally, whatever comes first.