GNOME 46.5 Released with Mutter and GNOME Shell Improvements
GNOME 46.5 is here five weeks after the GNOME 46.4 release and fixes smartcard logins, adds user permissions to new Wi-Fi connections for restricted users, fixes the showing of pending PAM messages on the login screen, and fixes the “Locate Pointer” accessibility option when the “Reduce Animation” option is turned on.
It also fixes several issues in the Mutter window and composite manager, including drag and drop between X11 and Wayland clients, drag and drop from grabbing pop-ups, EGLDevice support, frozen cursor on some hybrid machines, tablet input in maximized windows, frozen cursor after suspend, using modifiers on multi-GPU setups, propagating tablet device removals to clients, and touch window dragging with pointer lock enabled.
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Understanding GNOME Shell’s focus stealing prevention – GNOME Shell & Mutter
Focus stealing prevention exists for two main reasons: One is security, since we need to prevent rogue apps from deceiving users into e.g. typing their password into another window. If apps can silently claim keyboard focus and open their own window over the currently focused one, this enables phishing and other similar attacks. The other is user experience: Even if an app isn’t maliciously taking over your focus, it can be annoying to have a new window popping up while you’re typing something and have half your sentence end up in the wrong app.
At the same time there are cases where you want apps to be able to request focus, for example when clicking a link in a chat app and wanting it to open in the browser. In this case you want the focus to move to the browser window.
This is why our compositor library mutter implements focus stealing prevention mechanisms, which allow the currently focused app to request that a specific other app be allowed to claim focus now.
Planet GNOME:
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#166 Forty-seven! · This Week in GNOME
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 13 to September 20.
This new major release of GNOME is full of exciting changes, including accent colours, better open/save dialogs, an improved Files app, better support for small screen sizes, new dialog styles, and much more! See the GNOME 47 release notes and developer notes for more information.
Readers who have been following this site will already be aware of some of the new features. If you’d like to follow the development of GNOME 48 (Spring 2025), keep an eye on this page - we’ll be posting exciting news every week!