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 conjunct ...

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 ...

, 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 composit ...

. It became the default window manager in GNOME 3, replacing Metacity which used GTK for rendering.

Window management

Mutter uses a graphics library 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, ...

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 ha ...

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

References

External links