GTK 4.15 Released With Vulkan Renderer By Default

[mrg666]

In Vulkan it’s up to application to select which GPU will be used for rendering. Usually they simply choose first GPU that is able to handle what application needs but nothing stops them from adding more logic and pick another GPU. I don’t know how is this handled in GTK but nothing stops it from picking iGPU when iGPU and dGPU are both available or letting user choose by some environmental variable.

I would love to have a scheduler in the kernel doing load balancing and power optimization among the available GPUs. Maybe the application can choose the scheduler as a virtual GPU then to take advantage of optimizations.

[JackLilhammers]

I'd really like to move from qt to gtk, because I don't like the qt company, but imo the DX with gtk is significantly worse.
Gtk has better bindings to other languages, so it depends also on the language you use and the projects you're working on, but qt has much better tooling for the officially supported languages

[Quackdoc]

In Vulkan it’s up to application to select which GPU will be used for rendering. Usually they simply choose first GPU that is able to handle what application needs but nothing stops them from adding more logic and pick another GPU. I don’t know how is this handled in GTK but nothing stops it from picking iGPU when iGPU and dGPU are both available or letting user choose by some environmental variable.

This isn't wholly true, Many vulkan application will default to the high performance/discrete gpu. Vulkan (On linux) already has a mechanism to "prefer" a gpu. I have an rx580 and an a380 in my PC so I need to dump VK_LOADER_DEVICE_SELECT=0x8086:0x56a5 into my /etc/environment. Windows has it's own mechanism for this iirc. But when launching applications you can use a "Gpu select" and set one of the vulkan variable for this

[QwertyChouskie]

because the dGPU typically supports vulkan and the iGPU typically doesn't. I've got a laptop with a terascale iGPU and a GCN dGPU where this is the case.

12 year old laptops definitely aren't the "typical" case.

[rabcor]

Great! Now if only GTK4 wasn’t useless for anything more complex than a mobile app…

Let me fix that for you:

Great! Now if only GTK4 wasn’t complete garbage.

[hsci]

Not true.
I've used both GTK 3 and GTK 4, and I've used GTK both with Rust and Python. GTK is not useless for anything more complex than a mobile app. Also don't underestimate the complexity of a mobile app.

The API of GTK 4 is mostly the same as GTK 3 but with some refinements and improvements.

Overall I find GTK to be good even though there are some issues.

• PyGObject does not generate type hints. (issue 159)
• GLib does not integrate with Python's asyncio event loop. (issue 189)
• Some things in Rust required a bit boilerplate code but it has been improved and keeps getting more ergonomical.
• It complex applications it can get a bit tricky to manage state as there is no global state context. You can bind widgets to properties though.

Happy implemented a Gtk3 based application with C++ for Linux, Windows and MacOS. Wayland, HiDPI, Cross-Plattform, small resource footprint...yep

My smallest issues was the toolkit. My biggest? USB handling of MacOS. And the App Bundle for MacOS. The installer for Windows is also requires much work but it is easier than fiddling with the awkward restrictions from MacOS. These systems require much more work to ship a native package on Linux.

[Developer12]

12 year old laptops definitely aren't the "typical" case.

Tell that to a thinkpad enthusiast lol. Plenty of this hardware still in the wild, being used.

[QwertyChouskie]

Tell that to a thinkpad enthusiast lol. Plenty of this hardware still in the wild, being used.

Maybe I should have specified that 12 year old systems with both an iGPU and a dGPU aren't the "typical" case. At least in my experience, most old laptops either have an iGPU or a dGPU, not both.

[Developer12]

Maybe I should have specified that 12 year old systems with both an iGPU and a dGPU aren't the "typical" case. At least in my experience, most old laptops either have an iGPU or a dGPU, not both.

I'm sitting in front of a T430 (2012) with both an intel iGPU and an nvidia dGPU. I have another system, a G505s from lenovo (2013), that has an iGPU on the APU chip (terascale) and a GCN dGPU. This sort of configuration was extremely popular in the early 2010's as a way to have one's cake and eat it too: get good battery life on most tasks with the iGPU, and bring the full power of the dGPU to bear on difficult ones when needed.

Only more recently has better power saving meant that a powerful GPU can also become an efficient one when (not) needed.

[Alexmitter]

analogous version of Vulkan called Metal.

Metal is to Vulkan what Open GLES 2.0 is to OpenGL 4.6. I would not see any analogy beside that it was loosely inspired by mantle too.