GTK 3.98.2 Released As Another Step Towards GTK4

[Britoid]

And people like us will move on to Krita once we finally use it enough and it doesn't seem so alien when compared to using GIMP.

And Steam...

Ngl I use Krita too. The GIMP UI is something that is in severe need of fixing.

[bug77]

The one thing attracting to me is the vulkan backend.
The rendering engine of Gtk4 is finally on a par with macOS Mojave.

If properly done, a rendering backend is little more than a plugin. It doesn't need a major version change.
Plus, I really don;t get people's fixation with low-level APIs for DEs. DEs are probably the last type of software to benefit from those APIs, save for command line tools. I'm typing using the supposedly bloated KDE on a dual-screen setup, with half a dozen Firefox windows (not tabs) open and my GPU control panel reports 139MHz for the GPU and 810MHz for VRAM (ksysguard doesn't even register activity from plasma). DEs simply do not have that much of a CPU overhead and don't need the fine grained control over GPUs.

Another anticipating thing of mine comes from Gnome 4.
I think they may split the compositor process and the shell process during the transition to Wayland.
Currently they are they same one, and a segfault from shell takes down the whole DE.

So... nothing from GTK, but from Gnome instead.

[CommunityMember]

The GIMP UI is something that is in severe need of fixing.

The old joke (which is because you have to laugh rather than cry) is that GIMP is a great program with unmatched functionality that is impossible to find behind an unusable and opaque UI.

Those who are card carrying members of the church of GIMP may respond that your problem is simply that your faith is not strong enough for GIMP to be able to help you, and you need to spend more time at the altar learning the way.

[zxy_thf]

If properly done, a rendering backend is little more than a plugin. It doesn't need a major version change.
Plus, I really don;t get people's fixation with low-level APIs for DEs. DEs are probably the last type of software to benefit from those APIs, save for command line tools.

Well I'm mostly replying as a Gnome user.
The performance benefit would be very clear to end users (insert user feedback from macOS Mojave here), although in terms of API change this should be transparent to developers.

The backend is introduced along with the Gnome Scene Graph Kit afaik (didn't mention because I wasn't replying as a developer).
Not so sure if it's the only way to add vulkan support, but I'm assuming it's non trivial.
A comparable task is to add a wayland backend to Gtk2/Qt4.

As a developer recently I really hesitate to use Gtk/Qt directly. A HTML5 front end with a RESTful backend is more attractive (mainly because I have a headless server and this is the nature design to deploy the app to both of my server and my desktop).

[treba]

Since 2012 constantly a dependency of steamui.so, lol.

I don't know much about steams internals but Firefox also still carries some relicts from gtk2 days for flash plugin support (due to be dropped in the end of this year). Maybe that's similar for steam.

I'm happy to see the progress. More accelerated rendering, more wayland focused apis (instead of x11 focussed), lots of stuff that is simply done in more modern ways - great!

[Marc Driftmeyer]

The one thing attracting to me is the vulkan backend.
The rendering engine of Gtk4 is finally on a par with macOS Mojave.

Another anticipating thing of mine comes from Gnome 4.
I think they may split the compositor process and the shell process during the transition to Wayland.
Currently they are they same one, and a segfault from shell takes down the whole DE.

Wish fulfillment, but a good goal.

[ssokolow]

The backend is introduced along with the Gnome Scene Graph Kit afaik (didn't mention because I wasn't replying as a developer).
Not so sure if it's the only way to add vulkan support, but I'm assuming it's non trivial.
A comparable task is to add a wayland backend to Gtk2/Qt4.

Basically, GTK+ 4.x breaks API for the same reason that Qt breaks API in going from QWidget to Qt Quick (yes, they do eventually plan to expose Qt Quick to C++ as well as QML). They hit a wall on how much rendering workload they could move to the GPU with the old QPainter APIs.

[polarathene]

Plus, I really don;t get people's fixation with low-level APIs for DEs. DEs are probably the last type of software to benefit from those APIs

I imagine if You can run the DE with Wayland on Vulkan, then nvidia users would be happy? From what I hear, despite nvidia contributing code to get Wayland working on their hardware with Gnome and Plasma, both are lacking still compared to Intel/AMD driver support through Mesa?

Wouldn't help nvidia users with the XWayland issue I guess.

[SpyroRyder]

I imagine if You can run the DE with Wayland on Vulkan, then nvidia users would be happy? From what I hear, despite nvidia contributing code to get Wayland working on their hardware with Gnome and Plasma, both are lacking still compared to Intel/AMD driver support through Mesa?

Wouldn't help nvidia users with the XWayland issue I guess.

Vulkan isn't actually related to getting wayland running on Nvidia. It solves a bunch of related problems but does nothing in the GBM vs EglStreams debate.

[Cape]

GTK4 is the GTK3 we all deserved ... years ago ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Kids are using HTML to "program" apps based on electron (🤮) nowadays. Nobody cares about C toolkits for UIs anymore.

Even less so because they need to be cross platform to the max and have GREAT support for newer languages: rust, Javfuck, JavaShcript, whathaveyou...

How's GTK doing with rust on windows? My bet: not as good as an electron app(abortion)!!