Trying Out The Skia+Vulkan Powered LibreOffice 6.5 Development Build

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Trying Out The Skia+Vulkan Powered LibreOffice 6.5 Development Build

While LibreOffice 6.4 isn't even coming out until the end of January, we are already stoked about the follow-on release to this open-source office suite... Currently the development builds are towards LibreOffice 6.5 (though given the big impact we wouldn't be surprised if it morphed into LibreOffice 7.0) and one of the features that landed at the end of November is the Cairo drawing being replaced by Skia and with that Vulkan-based rendering support for this free office suite...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Trying-LibreOffice-Vulkan-Skia

[oleid]

[...] and the current VLC to GTK porting

Huh? Care to elaborate?

[Britoid]

Huh? Care to elaborate?

LibreOffice uses its own toolkit but under GTK envrionments more and more of it is rendered with GTK widgets. Because LibreOffice additionally also renders using GtkWindows, it has full Wayland support too.

There's a Qt backend too.

[Britoid]

Britoid Yes a default GTK version carefully designed to work on Wayland. And a hacky, experimental Qt build option with less testing and known bugs.

Whilst not dissing Qt, from what I remember Red Hat is employing someone to work on porting LibreOffice to GTK3 so you would expect it to be further along.

[timofonic]

What about Qt company employing developers to improve Qt support? Just saying...

[SpyroRyder]

What about Qt company employing developers to improve Qt support? Just saying...

Why would they though? Their product is the Qt toolkit and lower level stuff, not the software built ontop of the toolkit.
Now if there was a company that works Qt in the same way that Redhat works with GTK, ie building an ecosystem to sell their other products with, then thatd be a better company to badger about VCLs Qt support

[wizard69]

What about Qt company employing developers to improve Qt support? Just saying...

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.

[Vistaus]

Why would they though? Their product is the Qt toolkit and lower level stuff, not the software built ontop of the toolkit.

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.

[oleid]

LibreOffice uses its own toolkit but under GTK envrionments more and more of it is rendered with GTK widgets. Because LibreOffice additionally also renders using GtkWindows, it has full Wayland support too.

There's a Qt backend too.

Ah, that was just a typo. Right, I forgot about VCL and thought you were talking about videolan client. That confused me like hell

[oleid]

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?