LibreOffice Begins Landing GTK4 Support Code

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreOffice Begins Landing GTK4 Support Code

Ahead of this week's LibreOffice 7.2 Alpha and the feature freeze / branching next month, initial GTK4 toolkit support code has begun landing in this open-source office suite...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOffice-GTK4-Starts

[uid313]

Great!

I hope this can make for a better LibreOffice experience that feels more modern and fun.

[birdie]

Great!

I hope this can make for a better LibreOffice experience that feels more modern and fun.

On the other hand instead of improving the internals and fixing bugs they will now be constantly adjusting their codebase to new GTK releases.

[Hi-Angel]

That's a big initial commit. Were there so many incompatible changes between gtk3 and gtk4? Or is it just an unfortunate coincidence where LibreOffice used those features that were changed between gtk3 and gtk4?

[Azrael5]

Which benefits over GTK3?

[Sethox]

On the other hand instead of improving the internals and fixing bugs they will now be constantly adjusting their codebase to new GTK releases.

There is also another perspective. By overlooking the current code, it could mean that there is a time to improve. Find bugs and highlight the current code. New ways to base the code on is usually a good way to improve the existing code. In retrospect, it's annoying and usually useless but it's still a way to improve (got to take the good with the bad, but as long as one can improve, well it's good nonetheless).

[MrCooper]

Which benefits over GTK3?

GTK4 uses OpenGL for hardware accelerated drawing by default, so it generally performs much better than GTK3.

[Alexmitter]

On one hand, it's nice to see more GTK4 adoption by non-GNOME apps.
On the other hand, I really wish a solution could be found to fix the blurry fonts on non-hiDPI screens (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787), which are still very common.

This should be solved by https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-..._requests/3393 when merged.

[Danny3]

I would like to see better integration with KDE Plasma !

[kvuj]

GTK4 uses OpenGL for hardware accelerated drawing by default, so it generally performs much better than GTK3.

Don't forget a new, more efficient renderer (NGL) and initial vulkan support! I personally can't wait for epiphany to switch to GTK4 to see if I can finally start using it without feeling super slowed down.