GDM accepts passkeys and smart cards at the login screen in GNOME 51

Mutter is GNOME's compositor, the program that assembles windows into what appears on screen ^[17]. It had carried two NVIDIA-specific paths: EGLStreams, which applications used to draw on Wayland, and EGLDevice paired with EGLStream, which Mutter used to drive screen updates ^[9]. No other GPU vendor adopted EGLStreams, which NVIDIA had built as its own route to Wayland ^[10]. NVIDIA later added support for GBM, the buffer-allocation method the Intel and AMD drivers use, and the old path ended up serving only legacy drivers ^[11].

In the commit removing it, Ådahl wrote that the old approach had long been "replaced with the standard DMA buffer passing protocol in Wayland" ^[12]. Cards on NVIDIA's current drivers already use GBM and should see no change ^[13]. The machines that change behaviour are the ones on a driver branch old enough to need the deleted path, and the coverage does not list which branches those are, so the card model is the test ^[14].

The example given in the release coverage, a GeForce GTX 780, sits inside UbuntuHandbook's affected set: it is a 700-series card and not one of the three exceptions ^[6][1]. The check before either distribution upgrade runs per machine. Which desktops still hold a 700-series or older GeForce, and which of those have the proprietary driver installed.

On the sign-in side, the release notes describe the Kerberos work as useful to organizations whose sign-in already runs through Kerberos ^[4]. Remote Login now supports SSH socket servers, and fingerprint enrollment in Settings has a new interface ^[5].

Papers builds its signature by having the user draw with a mouse or touchscreen, or import an image whose background is removed automatically ^[15]. What lands on the page is a picture. Nothing in it identifies the signer or detects a later edit, and anyone holding the PDF can draw one ^[16].