Mutter (Software)

Mother is a window manager and also Wayland compositor.

Background

Mother was originally developed by Intel for the Moblin platform. Intel took as a basis the Metacity window manager, which was used in Gnome 2, and combined it with the program library clutter, so as to enable OpenGL -accelerated features, from where also the name of the short form of " Metacity Clutter " is derived.

By combining with Clutter graphical effects and hardware acceleration was enabled.

Clutter and the mother plugin are mostly written in JavaScript and C.

Areas of application

Nut is used in the Moblin successor MeeGo for netbooks, including mother is the only one compatible window manager. Moreover nut can be used in the other MeeGo variants that do not require special window manager.

The user interface of Ubuntu - called Unity - also presumed mother, but newer versions are based on Compiz.

In the desktop environment Gnome 3.0 nut is also used and presupposes it for Gnome Shell.

Criticism

Often the deep integration of mother in the GNOME Shell is seen as problematic. The use of another window manager is possible from Gnome 3.0 only in the alternate mode.