GTK4 Gets Smoother GPU-Accelerated Scrolling, Modern Cursor Blinking

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GTK4 Gets Smoother GPU-Accelerated Scrolling, Modern Cursor Blinking

GNOME developers continue to be hard at work on GTK4 and trying to ensure this major tool-kit update will be a great success...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK4-Scrolling-And-Blinking

[devius]

What I don't understand is how the smooth desktop experience has regressed in the first place. I remember that both Gnome and KDE were pretty smooth in 2006 on single core 2GHz CPUs with Radeon 9500 128MB GPUs. Why is this still an issue?

[birdie]

How many gigs of RAM does this nifty feature require?

Does it work with NVIDIA proprietary drivers?

Does it work out of the box or the code must be altered to enable it?

Can it be disabled? Can it be made faster?

[Britoid]

What I don't understand is how the smooth desktop experience has regressed in the first place. I remember that both Gnome and KDE were pretty smooth in 2006 on single core 2GHz CPUs with Radeon 9500 128MB GPUs. Why is this still an issue?

We're doing "more" and we have more pixels to push.

[SpyroRyder]

Does it work out of the box or the code must be altered to enable it?

Can it be disabled? Can it be made faster?

If its like the rest of the GTK4 changes then you'll have to alter your code as per usual for a major toolkit update but otherwise it'll be a free thing. A fading cursor just looks smoother and doesnt give a hit. The smooth scrolling should work fine on most hardware, although i can give you a comparison vs other current toolkits cause i havent really looked up performance comparisons since they did the inital merge of GSK 2 years ago

[treba]

Cool stuff and badly needed in the 4K+ era. Software painting simply doesn't cut it any more with so many pixel, while it does in low-res scenarios like on a 1024*768 screen, which was common back in 2006.

In the long run I'd love to see them pick of Pathfinder, if it turns out to be a success in FF Webrender.

[microcode]

What I don't understand is how the smooth desktop experience has regressed in the first place. I remember that both Gnome and KDE were pretty smooth in 2006 on single core 2GHz CPUs with Radeon 9500 128MB GPUs. Why is this still an issue?

Some of it is their switch from hard-coded theme engines to relatively slow free-form CSS-based theming; the other thing is that resolutions have increased dramatically while single-thread performance on CPUs has not increased by the same factor. When Apple doubled the resolution of the screens on their laptops, it became rarer that an application would (for example) resize smoothly.

The other issue with GNOME in particular is that their compositor and shell have been full of bugs which degrade the responsiveness and throughput of the whole GNOME desktop, even without GTK+ applications. I think this probably was allowed because the UX was otherwise greatly improved (for non-expert users).

To some extent, these toolkit improvements can help us get back to single-frame delays for most operations, but the amount of work being done to draw the interfaces is still dramatically more. Wayland Mutter is, as far as I can tell, a lot better behaved than X Mutter, so I think a lot of the weirdness of X Mutter will die with X.

[uid313]

I've heard GTK 4 shows widget visible by default so you don't have to do annoying show() and show_all() calls everywhere. That's nice.

Maybe it is a bit cumbersome to scatter code everywhere to update things in many places. In React you have state that you update, and that gets updated in every component/widget place that use it.

I tried the syntax highlighting in Yelp (Mallard) for Python but it didn't seem to highlight anything. I don't know if its broken or what. By the way, I wish Yelp did have support for dark mode.

Is GtkSourceView seeing any improvements in version 4?
I really wish there was support for Language Server Protocol (LSP).

I am still not sure whether I should declare my UI programmatically using code or using XML files. With code it does gets lots of code mixed in with your app logic, it gets messy. With XML files for the UI those are hard to refactor, and the dialect looks pretty cumbersome.

[Djhg2000]

How many gigs of RAM does this nifty feature require?

Does it work with NVIDIA proprietary drivers?

Does it work out of the box or the code must be altered to enable it?

Can it be disabled? Can it be made faster?

My speculation based on my experience with GNOME over the past decade would be:

Probably a minuscule fraction at the GTK level but several once implemented in GNOME.
Yes.
Yes.
No because the GNOME team has decided you want it (never forget bug #650371), and yes but it won't be made faster.

As much as I like GNOME their lack of flexibility has pushed me over to KDE Plasma.

[dremon_nl]

What is the current state of GTK look and feel on Windows? A couple of years back it was still horrible (no native widgets).
That's quite a bit unfortunate because otherwise it could be a good cross-platform framework e.g. for Rust language.