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Mutter is a
window manager A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunctio ...
initially designed and implemented for the
X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...
, but then evolved to be a
Wayland compositor Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a '' Wayland composito ...
. It became the default window manager in
GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...
3, replacing Metacity which used
GTK GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and propri ...
for rendering.


Window management

Mutter uses a graphics library called Clutter giving it
OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve har ...
capability. ''Mutter'' is a
portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsGNOME Shell GNOME Shell is the graphical shell of the GNOME desktop environment starting with version 3, which was released on April 6, 2011. It provides basic functions like launching applications, switching between windows and is also a widget engine. ...
, which is an integral part of GNOME 3. Mutter is extensible with plug-ins, and supports numerous visual effects.
GNOME Shell GNOME Shell is the graphical shell of the GNOME desktop environment starting with version 3, which was released on April 6, 2011. It provides basic functions like launching applications, switching between windows and is also a widget engine. ...
is written as a plug-in to Mutter.


Release history

Support for
HiDPI Pixels per inch (ppi) and pixels per centimetre (ppcm or pixels/cm) are measurements of the pixel density of an electronic image device, such as a computer monitor or television display, or image digitizing device such as a camera or image scanner. ...
was added to version 3.13 of Mutter by Adel Gadllah. In version 3.13.2 logind integration replaced mutter-launch. In version 3.13.3 (June 24, 2014) the server side bits of wl_touch_interface were implemented by Carlos Garnacho.


Forks


Muffin

Muffin is a fork of Mutter by the
Linux Mint Linux Mint is a community-driven Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (which is in turn based on Debian), bundled with a variety of free and open-source applications. It can provide full out-of-the-box multimedia support for those who choose to ...
team for their Cinnamon desktop environment. Cinnamon's shell, a fork of GNOME Shell, is written as a plugin for Muffin.


References


Further reading

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External links


Mutter tarballs

mutter-wayland tarballs

GNOME git: Mutter

GNOME Wiki: Mutter Gestures
{{Desktop environments and window managers for X11 and Wayland Compositing window managers Free software programmed in C Free X window managers GNOME Linux windowing system-related software Software that uses Clutter (software) Wayland compositors Window managers that use GTK