GTK Scene Kit Isn't Happening In Time For GNOME 3.22

With GNOME 3.19 there were plans for a GTK scenegraph and this GTK Scene Kit (GSK) was then planned for 3.20 and then most recently hoped for 3.22. But it's not happening.

One of the big user benefits to the GTK Scene Kit will be offloading more work to the GPU and while it looked like GSK may finally be a reality for GNOME 3.22, this morning we found out it's not going to be merged in time.

Per this week's GTK status update, "GSK has been reviewed during GUADEC, and the work on the conversion of widgets to the new retained rendering API is ongoing; the API won’t be merged for 3.22, in order to improve rendering performance, shake out the last API issues found during porting, and especially avoid last minute breaking of applications using their own rendering on top of GTK+ windows, like Firefox and LibreOffice."

Hopefully for GNOME 3.24! In other news, there is GTK tool-kit work on porting the Wayland back-end to the new tablet protocol plus other changes still happening. The GTK Windows back-end is also working on HiDPI improvements.

Other work still ongoing is a multi-paned widget, an image viewing widget, a tab bar widget for GtkStack, clean-up display/screen/monitor code, and GtkPathBar improvements. Other longer-term work is a new CSS parser, a new combo box, an overflow box widget, in-app notifications, deprecating GtkButtonBox, and more. Don't forget that GTK4 may be closer than you think with more information on their plans expected soon.