GNOME Shell3.28.2

GNOME Shell provides core interface functions like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide an amazing and easy to use experience.

GNOME Shell acts as a compositing manager for the desktop, and displays both application windows and other objects in a Clutter scene graph. Much of the code of the shell is written in Javascript but uses Clutter and GNOME platform libraries via GObject Introspection and JavaScript bindings for GNOME. For window management and compositing, GNOME Shell builds off of a Metacity branch called Mutter, which adds Clutter-based compositing to Metacity.