In preparation for the GNOME 3.19.2 release, the second development milestone towards the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, the GNOME developers are updating these days many of the project's core components and applications.

Therefore, today we would like to inform our readers about some of the changes implemented in the latest development versions of the GNOME Shell user interface and Mutter window manager components, which have been updated to version 3.19.2 and will be distributed as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.19.2 desktop environment.

Florian Müllner had the pleasure of published the release notes for both products, so we're now able to inform you guys that GNOME Shell 3.19.2 makes D-Bus activable, addresses a crash in the browser plugin that affected the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and it optionally displays battery percentage in system status area.

On the other hand, Mutter 3.19.2 fixes a crash that occurred when the monitor was unplugged, allows the detection of backend settings from the session type, addresses the detection of DRM hardware for non-PCI devices, and repairs the initialization of the bypass compositor hint.

Available for testing as part of GNOME 3.19.2

Furthermore, Mutter now exits cleanly when initialization errors are being displayed, and it no longer forces the placement of windows that don't have a buffer under the next-generation Wayland display server. For GNOME Shell 3.19.2, the developers also managed to fix six other miscellaneous bugs that haven't been detailed in the changelog, as well as to update ten language translations.

If you want to help test these development versions, you can start by downloading the GNOME Shell 3.19.2 and Mutter 3.19.2 sources right now from Softpedia. Of course, you will need to compile the packages by hand, otherwise you must wait for the GNOME 3.19.2 packages to arrive in the main software repos of your GNU/Linux operating systems. Once again, we remind you that these are pre-release versions, not suitable for production use.