Belated GTK 3.98 Puts GTK 4.0 One Step Closer

The release of the long sought after GTK 4.0 is one step closer to finally becoming reality with the slightly delayed GTK 3.98 now being available for testing.

GTK 3.98 doesn't yet mark feature completion for GTK 4.0 but does move the toolkit closer to where the developers want it to be for GTK4. GTK 3.98 incorporates nine months worth of toolkit work and thus there is a lot at hand. GTK 3.98 brings various performance improvements and optimizations to the OpenGL renderer, continued CSS styling improvements, the drag-and-drop refactoring has been completed, GDK continues becoming more Wayland-focused, various deprecated components have been removed and other fundamental GTK changes, and new widget additions like GtkNative have been introduced.

Among the features still to be tackled before GTK 4.0 include movable popovers, event controllers for keyboard shortcuts, an animation API, improved accessibility, and other improvements. We'll see if GTK 4.0 manages to meet its latest release goal of debuting this autumn.

More details on GTK 3.98 via GTK.org.