GTK+ Lands Experimental Backend For Mir Display Server

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GTK+ Lands Experimental Backend For Mir Display Server

GTK+ apps now run not only on X11 and Wayland under Linux with native support but the mainline GTK+ Git code now also supports running Ubuntu's Mir Display Server. That's right, there's now mainline Mir support in GTK for the GNOME/GTK 3.16 release...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgyMTQ

[J?rnS]

I guess GTK-devs want to seem open for everyone, because one of the biggest players in linux land moves away from them. Too late - Qt5 is the future for most projects.

[dh04000]

We know that a qt5/qml backend has existed for ages and we can assume is in good order at this point. Once GTK+ is good working order in Mir, what backends are left that are crucial? XUL for firefox and thunderbird I guess, but what else is left? It seems like something is missing, but I can't seem to remember it.

[emblemparade]

Whatever toolkit Unity 8 uses, all the default Ubuntu applications, and of course many more in the repositories, use GTK+. So obviously there would be a lot of interest in Ubuntu to have GTK+ use Mir directly, instead of via XMir. I'm sure the Qt work is being done in parallel.

By the way, two other important toolkits also need to be ported to use Wayland and Mir as backends:

1. VCL, which is used by LibreOffice.
2. wxWidgets, which isn't that widely used, but there are still a few popular applications that use it: Filezilla, Audacity, aMule

Any news about efforts there, Michael?

The above of course would work with X11 emulation, but of course we want to avoid that overhead.

[ssokolow]

Whatever toolkit Unity 8 uses, all the default Ubuntu applications, and of course many more in the repositories, use GTK+. So obviously there would be a lot of interest in Ubuntu to have GTK+ use Mir directly, instead of via XMir. I'm sure the Qt work is being done in parallel.

By the way, two other important toolkits also need to be ported to use Wayland and Mir as backends:

1. VCL, which is used by LibreOffice.
2. wxWidgets, which isn't that widely used, but there are still a few popular applications that use it: Filezilla, Audacity, aMule

Any news about efforts there, Michael?

The above of course would work with X11 emulation, but of course we want to avoid that overhead.

wxWidgets wraps a platform-native toolkit. On Linux, the wxWidgets backend is wxGTK, so it should already be covered with little or no effort.

[blackout23]

I'd much rather see GTK2 ported to Wayland. Should not be impossible? The payoff would be immense since there are a metric shit ton of them around. Qt4 aswell. We would hardly need Xwayland anymore.

[dragonn]

I'd much rather see GTK2 ported to Wayland. Should not be impossible? The payoff would be immense since there are a metric shit ton of them around. Qt4 aswell. We would hardly need Xwayland anymore.

Some of my apps already moved to qt5 like Kadu, qpdfview, qterminal - for my it looks like porting app from qt4 to qt5 is much easier then porting from gtk2 to gtk3. So qt4 is needed so much like gtk2 on Wayland.

[arnaudv6]

I just registered, so hello guys ! And while we are at it, two things urgent =offtopic :
- I am actually proud taking part of this comunity : have been reading posts from many of you guys with much interest since years.
- Adblock on. That I urged to say, sorry : Michael often gets the worst, childish crap out of me, actually he excels at that.
But then I'm back for good to the adult age, which I had to give at registration. And pray do not follow me on this troll.

My point here being VCL is just about picking between GtK and Qt at runtime for me...
Not sure it is easy porting to wayland though. Not for wxWidgets either.
And Fltk also come to my mind : used by TigerVNC for instance. Here I wish they could port to Qt.

[Viper_Scull]

I'd much rather see GTK2 ported to Wayland. Should not be impossible? The payoff would be immense since there are a metric shit ton of them around. Qt4 aswell. We would hardly need Xwayland anymore.

You can forget about that. It won't happen.

[Delgarde]

I'd much rather see GTK2 ported to Wayland. Should not be impossible? The payoff would be immense since there are a metric shit ton of them around. Qt4 aswell. We would hardly need Xwayland anymore.

That's difficult, because GTK2 didn't hide the underlying toolkit very well... you could write GTK2 programs for Windows or OSX or X11, but the code wouldn't be perfectly portable between them. So even if GTK2 were ported to Wayland, you'd still need some code changes to all of the applications that used it, and if you needed to support both X11 and Wayland, you'd need to ship two different versions of the binary.

That was one of the drivers behind GTK3 - a new major version allowed an API break, which mean they could actually fix some of these things.... to remove some of those leaky abstractions that made it harder to produce a portable app. That's why a GTK3 app can run on both X11 and Wayland without even needing to recompile - the underlying platform is better hidden, so the toolkit can transparently choose X11 or Wayland at runtime...