Trying Out The Skia+Vulkan Powered LibreOffice 6.5 Development Build

[Britoid]

But if the widgets are rendered using gtk+, will it use its pixmap backend and just blit those using skia? Or how will it work?

You're confusing with drawing libraries with widget toolkits. LibreOffice can use GTK (which ultimately uses Cairo) to build a lot of it's UI, but Cairo (and now Skia) is still used when drawing parts of the app like the editor. This result of this is then placed on top of a GtkWindow.

[oleid]

You're confusing with drawing libraries with widget toolkits. LibreOffice can use GTK (which ultimately uses Cairo) to build a lot of it's UI,

But LibreOffice is still using VCL these days? The I was wondering if GTK+ is merely used for drawing the widgets (the same way as Qt emulates GTK+ themes) or if GTK+ widgets are really wrapped and the event handling is done by gtk+ (basically what wxWidgets does).

In the latter case, only parts of the UI would be drawn with Skia (maybe a widget), in the former all of the UI and gtk+ would only be used for theming.

[SpyroRyder]

True, but they could also benefit from having a showcase, and what would be better to kickstart that then the most popular (at least from a 3rd party) media player around? And to be perfect for the showcase, they could iron out all of the rough edges. So yeah, they'd benefit in some way.

Ah, youre thinking of VLC. VCL is a similar acronym but is the UI library of Libreoffice. It takes the route of being 'native' on all platforms by having backends for that platform. Its not great but its also too embeded in the code to remove and rewrite things. Fixing the Qt backend would be a non-trivial task with probably very little ROI for them due to not many pure Qt platforms exisiting that have the need or ability to run a full mouse and keybaord driven officesuit

[caligula]

I have to agree why would they? You would need a distro provider for do this. Frankly QT is a bit of an underdog right now with a much wider acceptance of GTK3.

this isn’t ideal as I’d rather see a toolkit built on modern languages and constructs getting all of the attention. The state of QT on C++ really isn’t “modern” though there are goals in place to better use modern C++. Still I’d rather see something entirely new built on Swift or maybe even Rust that gives us a modern well supportted environment. Baring that GTK3 is really our best bet at the moment.

Indeed, C++ is a dead end and interfacing with Qt from better languages is pain.

[mike456]

C++ is not dead end. It's very modern coding if you use the latest revision.

[ed31337]

The copylefted LibreOffice was born from the ashes of the CLA dumpster fire called OpenOffice. It’s pretty naive to think that CLAed Qt will play any significant in copyleft LibreOffice.

Slaves smithing their own shackles? No way.

Forgive me for being behind the times, but how would a Qt LibreOffice be "slaves smithing their own shackles?" GTK is LGPL. Qt is LGPL. I see no difference in shackles here...

[Britoid]

Forgive me for being behind the times, but how would a Qt LibreOffice be "slaves smithing their own shackles?" GTK is LGPL. Qt is LGPL. I see no difference in shackles here...

from what I understand, Qt can be licensed under a proprietary license so if a company does any changes to it they don't have to open source them. The Qt developers can also keep certain features only available in the proprietary version.

[Vistaus]

Ah, youre thinking of VLC. VCL is a similar acronym but is the UI library of Libreoffice. It takes the route of being 'native' on all platforms by having backends for that platform. Its not great but its also too embeded in the code to remove and rewrite things. Fixing the Qt backend would be a non-trivial task with probably very little ROI for them due to not many pure Qt platforms exisiting that have the need or ability to run a full mouse and keybaord driven officesuit

I was thinking of VLC because I replied to a post saying VLC. Apparently, that was a typo then...

[FireBurn]

I wonder if it'll let you pick the Vulkan card it renders on, on my Intel+AMDGPU setup the games usually default to the dedicated AMDGPU card, but for LibreOffice I'd like it to use the Intel integrated one to save power

[Michael]

I wonder if it'll let you pick the Vulkan card it renders on, on my Intel+AMDGPU setup the games usually default to the dedicated AMDGPU card, but for LibreOffice I'd like it to use the Intel integrated one to save power

Right now it just picks the first adapter. I think they have plans to improve that eventually though since at last check it also didn't do much in the way of compatibility checks for verifying v1.1 or greater, etc.