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 3, replacing

Metacity Metacity was the default window manager used by the GNOME 2 desktop environment until it was replaced by Mutter in GNOME 3. It is still used by GNOME Flashback, a session for GNOME 3 that provides a similar user experience to the Gnome 2.x seri ...

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 propriet ...

for rendering.

Window management

Mutter uses a

graphics library A graphics library is a program library designed to aid in rendering computer graphics to a monitor. This typically involves providing optimized versions of functions that handle common rendering tasks. This can be done purely in software and runn ...

called

Clutter Clutter and its derivations may refer to any of the following: Excessive physical disorder * Clutter, a confusing, or disorderly, state or collection, and possible symptom of compulsive hoarding * Clutter (marketing), numerous advertisements, a ...

giving it OpenGL 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 i ...

team for their Cinnamon desktop environment. Cinnamon's shell, a fork of GNOME Shell, is written as a plugin for Muffin.

References

External links