Mutter is a Wayland1 display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.
When used as a Wayland display server, it runs on top of KMS and libinput. It implements the compositor side of the Wayland core protocol as well as various protocol extensions. It also has functionality related to running X11 applications using Xwayland.
When used on top of Xorg it acts as a X11 window manager and compositing manager.
Mutter is used by, for example, GNOME Shell, the GNOME core user interface, and by Gala, elementary OS’s window manager. It can also be run standalone, using the command “mutter”, but just running plain mutter is only intended for debugging purposes.
Features include:
- Uses a fork of Cogl, a hardware acceleration abstraction library used to simplify usage of OpenGL pipelines, as well as a fork of Clutter, a scene graph and user interface toolkit.
- Extensible with plug-ins, and supports numerous visual effects. GNOME Shell is written as a plug-in to Mutter.
- Support for HiDPI.
Website: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter
Support:
Developer: The GNOME Project
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Mutter is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
1 Wayland is a computer protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a reference implementation of the protocol in the C programming language. Wayland’s main goal is replacing the X Window System with a modern, simpler windowing system in Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
Return to Stacking Window Managers | Return to Compositing Window Managers | Return to Window Managers | Return to Stacking Wayland Compositors
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