GTK 3.99 Released With The GTK4 Toolkit Finally Close To Debut

[You-]

And as a third party, I say now is the perfect time to port your software from GTK 2 to GTK 3, which is now stable.

I will suggest that you are 5 years out of date with your information.

[bearoso]

I will suggest that you are 5 years out of date with your information.

I personally know GTK 3 has been very stable for a long time (since 3.22, which is about 4 years). Some people don't realize that, though, and are holding onto GTK 2, which has a lot of problems on modern systems.

[Klassic Six]

So GNOME 3.40 will release as 4.0 or this is has nothing to do with GNOME??

[oleid]

So GNOME 3.40 will release as 4.0 or this is has nothing to do with GNOME??

Not directly related to the gnome version.

[jacob]

GTK4 promises to be a technically impressive release but GTK has a lot of work to do to repair its reputation, and that has nothing to do with its technical merits and everything to do with (botched) project management. Let's just hope they learnt from the GTK3-era mistakes.

[andyholmes]

Still no thumbnails in the file picker? Sad.

Doesn't really matter, it's not an API/ABI break to add that later. If it's going to happen, the new widget-recycling list & grid views are what will make it possible without OOM'ing your system when you open a folder with tens of thousands of images or videos.

[scottishduck]

For GNOME 4 all I want is for it to perform competently. A rethink on the UI would be nice, but more than anything I think people just want it to be responsive. Hopefully the new backend and Vulkan renderer make that a reality.

[dragon321]

So GNOME 3.40 will release as 4.0 or this is has nothing to do with GNOME??

GNOME Shell is written using St toolkit, not GTK, so it's unrelated to GTK. There are some ideas to rewrite Shell with GTK and split UI from compositor but I don't know if such work is started.

Hopefully the new backend and Vulkan renderer make that a reality.

It won't for now because Shell isn't using GTK. Maybe when they rewrite Shell with GTK for GNOME 4. Separation of UI from compositor also should help here.

[Morty]

And as a third party, I say now is the perfect time to port your software from GTK 2 to GTK 3,

Of the remaining unported GTK 2 software out there, lots of it is dead or nearly unmaintained. Or have very slow development. One exeption, or not, is GIMP. Not many aktive projects left sitting on the fence. And many of the larger ones have already made the sensible choice, avoided the whole mess, and ported to Qt.

[arQon]

I personally know GTK 3 has been very stable for a long time (since 3.22, which is about 4 years).

I personally know this is not true, and that a recent release of GTK3 broke some of my code by randomly changing the size of a window element. Maybe you mean the *API* is stable now - but the code is still not - and frankly is about what any decent developer would consider beta at best, given its massive bug count.

The good news is, it WILL be "stable" now. Still heavily crap-laden, but stable. But only because the people who've been screwing up on it for years are going to abandon it half-finished - as usual - and move on to something New And Shiny - as usual.