GTK 4.2 Releasing Next Month With Likely Introducing A New OpenGL Renderer

[Mez']

I have to say that the popover shadow screenshot is very promising. Not for the shadow itself, but because it seems GTK 4 is much more polished than it's ever been, and refined in the details. Maybe GTK apps will finally mature and get over that amateurish look it's always given them and to Gnome by extension.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Theory seems like a beautiful place, but no one's actually ever been there. Let's see how it materializes eventually.

And regarding the compose keys, will it mean I can finally do Alt + 0177 somehow or do I still have to contort my arm and fingers to use the very practical (ahem) and 3 times longer to produce Ctrl+shift+u + 00b1 to get the plus-minus sign "±" of which I have a fairly frequent use?

[M@GOid]

I have to say that the popover shadow screenshot is very promising. Not for the shadow itself, but because it seems GTK 4 is much more polished than it's ever been, and refined in the details. Maybe GTK apps will finally mature and get over that amateurish look it's always given them and to Gnome by extension.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Theory seems like a beautiful place, but no one's actually ever been there. Let's see how it materializes eventually.

And regarding the compose keys, will it mean I can finally do Alt + 0177 somehow or do I still have to contort my arm and fingers to use the very practical (ahem) and 3 times longer to produce Ctrl+shift+u + 00b1 to get the plus-minus sign "±" of which I have a fairly frequent use?

If you have frequent use for this sign and if it is so convoluted to type it, you probably will benefit from creating a dedicated keyboard shortcut for it and other exotic signs. Xmodmap is a option for this. Maybe the Gnome UI have another option too.

[uid313]

The popover shadows.

[smartalgorithm]

The popover shadows.

i really like in GNOME's interface using the title bar to show some buttons... it is so beautiful, functional and efficient... I'd like to put that in KDE somehow...

[t.s.]

Wish they can reduce their mem footprint. Last I use,
- Ubuntu 20.04 gnome 3 use about ~800MB. (odroid N2 4GB)
- Latest XFCE (arch) using gnome3 components use about 600MB. (odroid N2 4GB)
- KDE Plasma (arch) >= 5.19, use 600MB. (Latitude e6440 16GB)
All use 64bit system.

Too bad XFCE that is one of the champion of lightweight DE is now that bloated.

[t.s.]

FWIW, the graphics rendering hasn't used all that much CPU/GPU power in recent years. If you measured the load during a short period of few seconds, the rendering might show up as 1% or so (CPU). Sure, before SVGA became common, old underpowered CPUs couldn't even perform basic double-buffering without any further rendering. Well, they could have if only page flipping was available. The first gen Raspberry Pi is about as fast as Pentium 2 or 3. Even that could run Full HD desktop with smooth graphics. Your other specs aren't that bad either. Modern Linux can with zswap/zstd allows running much larger software without resorting to disk based swap. Would be more impressive if GTK/Gnome ran on some very low end < 1W embedded hardware that had support for OpenGL 4.5+ / Vulkan nonetheless.

Unlikely. Low end system usually have low RAM. How can we run gnome that use too much mem? It'll more reasonable to use qt, as they're designed to use in embedded system.

[StanGenchev]

As far as I know OpenGL is deprecated in macOS since Mojave and in BigSur, they even removed the OpenGL driver fallback. So while it still exists, it's going to be removed in the very near future, possibly in the next release of macOS. So why run GTK 4 on macOS using OpenGL at all? What will happen when OpenGL is finally removed? Is GTK going to start relying on Zink which will in turn rely on MoltenVK or just switch to the Vulkan backend which will use MoltenVK?

To me it doesn't make any sense, why they went with OpenGL on macOS, considering it was a known for a fact that OpenGL is deprecated. It would've made more sense to just use MoltenVK from the start.

Does anyone know the reasons and possibly the future plan?

[Mez']

If you have frequent use for this sign and if it is so convoluted to type it, you probably will benefit from creating a dedicated keyboard shortcut for it and other exotic signs. Xmodmap is a option for this. Maybe the Gnome UI have another option too.

Keyboard shortcuts in Gnome settings don't allow successive input, I can only get Alt + 0 before it's recorded. For consistency's sake with my Windows work machine, I'd like to keep the same shortcut (Alt + 0177).
I didn't know about xmodmap, it doesn't seem quite straightforward (GUI or easy conf file) though but rather some obscure usage command (instructions are incomprehensible). Nothing user-friendly.

I'm not sure I understand why ASCII characters can't be typed through "alt + number" in the first place, it's much more convenient (even if coming from Windows) than Ctrl + shift + u and let's not even mention the need of both letters and numbers afterwards (pretty distant on a keyboard). Why so much gymnastics?

So hopefully, the combine keys change can address this issue somehow.

[duby229]

I didn't realize Gnome couldn't already do pop-up shadows....

[M@GOid]

Keyboard shortcuts in Gnome settings don't allow successive input, I can only get Alt + 0 before it's recorded. For consistency's sake with my Windows work machine, I'd like to keep the same shortcut (Alt + 0177).
I didn't know about xmodmap, it doesn't seem quite straightforward (GUI or easy conf file) though but rather some obscure usage command (instructions are incomprehensible). Nothing user-friendly.

I'm not sure I understand why ASCII characters can't be typed through "alt + number" in the first place, it's much more convenient (even if coming from Windows) than Ctrl + shift + u and let's not even mention the need of both letters and numbers afterwards (pretty distant on a keyboard). Why so much gymnastics?

So hopefully, the combine keys change can address this issue somehow.

If you can create the shortcut with just "Alt+0" (I did it in KDE) it is already something, at last in my book. Plus you can type it faster than Windows, so that become the clunky one.

Xmodmap was a bad tip I gave you. I was reading its Man file and it works only to modify keys, not to create shortcuts per se. I used it to change a key in a Thinkpad I have, until its keyboard layout started to come included about 5 years ago.