mutter VS gnome-shell

Compare mutter vs gnome-shell and see what are their differences.

mutter

Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter (by GNOME)
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gitlab.gnome.org
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gnome-shell

Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell (by GNOME)
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gitlab.gnome.org
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mutter gnome-shell
12 31
192 767
3.6% 1.4%
9.9 9.8
8 days ago 1 day ago
C C
GNU General Public License v3.0 only GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

mutter

Posts with mentions or reviews of mutter. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-05-10.
  • Weird graphics / Gnome window resizing problem
    1 project | /r/EndeavourOS | 9 Nov 2022
    Kewl. I guess the bug report should go to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter
  • I want VRR (freesync), therefore : how to install mutter-VRR for Ubuntu Gnome Wayland ?
    1 project | /r/gnome | 9 Oct 2022
    Regarding Ubuntu Gnome Wayland, I heard that there is the possibility to get VRR working with mutter-vrr (and gnome-control-center-VRR ?) https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter
  • Compositor
    1 project | /r/pop_os | 28 Sep 2022
  • Would love to be able to use keyboard shortcut on this menu
    1 project | /r/gnome | 23 May 2022
    You should create an issue in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter for this.
  • Dvorak keyboard with Qwerty shortcuts on Wayland
    2 projects | /r/gnome | 10 May 2022
    As a result I'm studying the wayland architecture (I like gnome so the compositor would be Mutter) so that I can figure out how to either make a hack or make something legitimate. This is proving time consuming.
  • Found this gem on the Fedora wiki. Look at the Nvidia entry
    1 project | /r/Fedora | 3 Apr 2022
    Hmm.. I'm not sure about the negativo drivers, but if you need EGLstreams working it seems like there are a few build options for mutter you can use? https://github.com/GNOME/mutter/blob/main/meson_options.txt
  • GNOME 42 release notes
    4 projects | /r/gnome | 23 Mar 2022
    pkgname=mutter pkgver=42.0 pkgrel=0.1 pkgdesc="A window manager for GNOME" url="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter" arch=(x86_64) license=(GPL) depends=(dconf gobject-introspection-runtime gsettings-desktop-schemas libcanberra startup-notification zenity libsm gnome-desktop upower libxkbcommon-x11 gnome-settings-daemon libgudev libinput pipewire xorg-xwayland graphene libxkbfile libsysprof-capture) makedepends=(git gobject-introspection egl-wayland meson xorg-server wayland-protocols sysprof) checkdepends=(xorg-server-xvfb wireplumber python-dbusmock) provides=(libmutter-10.so) groups=(gnome) _commit=9249aba72a5c4454894c08735a4963ca1665e34d # tag/42.00 source=( "git+https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter.git#commit=$_commit" "https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441.patch" ) sha256sums=('SKIP' 'SKIP')
  • Does Pop OS 21.10 use a compositor?
    1 project | /r/pop_os | 8 Feb 2022
    Mutter
  • River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2022
    Wayland is a protocol - not an implementation. It tries to minify latency by merging together some of the components X11 had and tries to do this in a slim and faster way.

    The implementation of the protocol may differ, but I know for example MUTTER (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter)

    This article has nice and not too complex visualisations: https://www.secjuice.com/wayland-vs-xorg/

  • LWQt Wayland DE 2nd Demo
    5 projects | /r/LXQt | 12 Jan 2022
    Stock Mutter - in contrast to this fork of it - would not work either.

gnome-shell

Posts with mentions or reviews of gnome-shell. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-09.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing mutter and gnome-shell you can also consider the following projects:

sway - i3-compatible Wayland compositor

GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk

lxqt - Checkout all LXQt components at once by using git submodule. Discussions, Wiki and general issues are here.

Adwaita-recolor - Script for recoloring Adwaita. Public Domain because of Feren's wishes.

labwc - A Wayland window-stacking compositor

plasma-desktop - Plasma for the Desktop

gnome-unstable

greenfield - HTML5 Wayland compositor :seedling:

lwqt-session - The LXQt session manager

flathub - Issue tracker and new submissions

lwqt-pcmanfm - File manager and desktop icon manager (Qt port of PCManFM and libfm)

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

mutter vs sway gnome-shell vs GTK+ mutter vs lxqt gnome-shell vs Adwaita-recolor mutter vs labwc gnome-shell vs plasma-desktop mutter vs gnome-unstable gnome-shell vs greenfield mutter vs lwqt-session gnome-shell vs flathub mutter vs lwqt-pcmanfm gnome-shell vs rust