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

[elduderino]

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?

Lot's to unwrap here, and the decisions were all mine considering I wrote this code.

First off, it seems very unlikely that OpenGL will be fully removed even though it's deprecated. The M1 just shipped with an OpenGL implemented on top of Metal.

OpenGL is the one accelerated renderer we have that works everywhere. It's the most mature and the Vulkan renderer isn't ready for prime time yet. That didn't leave me with many options to have something ready for when GTK 4 shipped. Either somehow magically mature the Vulkan renderer on three platforms, or get the already mature OpenGL renderer working.

All work to improve the OpenGL renderer directly benefits the Linux ecosystem because that is what almost everyone will be running on Linux for some time. Given I don't actually use Mac, this seemed like the best use of my time so I could benefit form the work too.

Furthermore, Zink is doing *really* good these days. So yeah, relying on Zink->MoltenVK is actually a fantastic possibility for us in case that matures faster than GTK's Vulkan renderer. Especially since it seems more and more likely that Valve is going to continue investing in it for Mac gaming portability.

Anyway, happy to answer any more questions, now that this is the 5th time I've answered the same questions on phoronix...

[finalzone]

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.

Deconstruct that statistics to see what are exactly running in the background for a nearly accurate comparison. Also considering the above method compares two distributions: one for a stable release set by that distribution and another basically depends on the user setting.

[caligula]

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.

Most single board computers these days have plenty of RAM. That is, one GB or more.