Ardour 8.4 Digital Audio Workstation: Still Relying On GTK2, Adds AAF Import

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ardour 8.4 Digital Audio Workstation: Still Relying On GTK2, Adds AAF Import

Ardour 8.4 was released this week as the newest update to this open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) for Linux / macOS / Windows platforms...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ardour-8.4-DAW

[Anux]

Nothing wrong with using GTK 2 if all functionality they need is there. The time is much better used with fixes and features.
Also it integrates much better into most DEs and looks better and wastes less space on the screen.

[Azpegath]

Nothing wrong with using GTK 2 if all functionality they need is there. The time is much better used with fixes and features.
Also it integrates much better into most DEs and looks better and wastes less space on the screen.

There are quite some discussions regarding this in their forum and they themselves state that they hardly use any GTK-stuff anymore and that they won't be spending resources on porting to GTK3 when most of their code is using custom components already.

From 2019:

https://discourse.ardour.org/t/gtk3-migration/101873
There are no plans to migrate to GTK3/4, the eventual goal is to move away from GTK. Ardour does not use many GTK widgets anymore. There is also no obvious benefit from migrating.

From Dec 2020:

https://discourse.ardour.org/t/gtk-2...moval/105214/2
"Anyway, is there some sort of expectation of if/when GTK2 will be removed from the rest of Ardour’s codebase?"

There is not.
Also even when moving away from gtk+, Ardour will keep depending on gdk2 for window and event system abstraction.
We’ve investigated and concluded that neither gtk3 nor gtk4 offers any benefit to Ardour, and hence we cannot justify spending time to migrate. Especially since it would set back Ardour development at least a year, likely more.
[...]
One way to think about the GTK2 issue is: we (ardour developers) and our users (who support our work by getting ardour from ardour.org) have no problems caused by our use of GTK2 and even looking ahead several years, we don’t anticipate any problems will be caused by it.
Not only that, but the move to a newer version would only create new issues.
With that in mind, it’s hard to feel that motivated to even consider it.

Now, to be fair, i’m not really suggesting that distro-build users and self-builders are not also part of the community or not part of the user base.
However, we (Ardour developers) “figured out” a solution to this issue years ago, and that’s distributing our own distro-neutral package of the program. If we one day cannot build that, then we have a problem we will have to fix, but the fact that some distros may have difficulties building their own packages? it’s really hard for us to be concerned about this.

Today (Feb 2024):

https://discourse.ardour.org/t/ardou...eleased/109913
From a project-level perspective, perhaps the most important change is that we have moved the source code of our GUI toolkit (GTK v2) into the Ardour source tree. This has no impact whatsoever on people using the builds provided at ardour.org 2.

However, this version of GTK is about to be deprecated by a number of Linux distributions, and without this change it will become more difficult for both individual users and Linux package maintainers to continue building Ardour. This also leaves us free to (slowly) strip down aspects of the toolkit that we do not use, and potentially modify it as needed in the future. It also means that even the distribution builds of Ardour for Linux will contain our patches to GTK, which has historically not been the case.

Q: "Does this mean native Wayland support will come in the future?"
A: No plans for Wayland support. Doing the work will get our users nothing, more or less.

Q: "No plans to update to a newer GTK version?"
A: "No plans to ever move to a newer version of GTK. That work will get our users very little, and so the cost/benefit analysis says “nope”."

I love that they are very practical in their "cost-benefit-analysis". They software is progressing very nicely and continuously releasing new versions.

[Pranos]

So no Wayland, while other Distros (like Fedora) switch complete to Wayland.

[Azpegath]

So no Wayland, while other Distros (like Fedora) switch complete to Wayland.

Not for the time being. Unless they want to implement it themselves in their Ardour library, which I guess they might in the future, if there is any user gains in it.

Ardour does not use any GTK widgets/components, so an update is completely irrelevant for Wayland support.

I doubts that XWayland has any drawback when it comes to Ardour, but I guess they will find out when more and more distributions switch to pure Wayland.

[bple2137]

So no Wayland, while other Distros (like Fedora) switch complete to Wayland.

I use Ardour with Xwayland all the time and it’s mostly fine.
Sadly, it’s not possible to easily move to Wayland with something like DAW, because even if they ported all of Ardour GUIs (which are countless and that would be quite a effort), the big part of any DAW is to load audio plugins. Ardour supports VST2, VST3, LADSPA and LV2. Apart from LADSPA, all plugins draw their own GUIs that are completely custom and independent of a given DAW. And it’s all dependent on X11 and will stay that way probably forever. Maybe Wayland DAWs could somehow learn to draw plugin interfaces with Xwayland, but in case of Ardour, its devs have no interest in supporting Wayland directly, so it’s hard to expect anything here.

[Weasel]

That's why Ardour makes actual progress.

No, toolkit ports and UI redesigns are not progress, sorry zoomers.

[SleeepyKat]

Still GTK2? That means no HiDPI support and no wayland. I couldn't use this software (and I am not a zoomer).

[prokoudine]

So no Wayland, while other Distros (like Fedora) switch complete to Wayland.

There is no single LV2/VST plugin out there built with Wayland support. What are you going to do without plugins in a DAW apart from recording and cutting? Stare at it intently?

Still GTK2? That means no HiDPI support and no wayland. I couldn't use this software (and I am not a zoomer).

It works on HiDPI just fine here, there's built-in UI scaling.

[mdedetrich]

Stare at it intently?

Why not, sounds kinda hypnotic actually,