If it ain't broke don't "fix" it Can you tell the difference between GTK-2 & GTK-4 apps ? (I'll give you 30 minutes to come up with an answer) EDIT: he didn't
Hi, GTK team member here. Opening the GTK5 development indeed does *not* mean GTK5 is going to be released any time soon; we'll have a few years of development and iterations on the API, especially now that we have platform libraries like libadwaita. It is also true that a development cycle of 9 years is too long: we made decisions early in GTK3, like scaling and text rendering, that do not mesh well with how fast things move, these days. Some things can be done compatibly during a stable cycle, but some cannot. It is untenable to tell people to wait 9 years to address shortcomings encoded in your API. Of course, the two years proposal in 2016 was never going to fly-it was a proposal, after all, and we iterated over it until we published the actual process that we followed for the release of GTK4, and for future releases. The important thing is that once GTK5 is out, GTK4 will be feature frozen (just like GTK3 is these days) and that we will offer migration guides on how to port GTK4 applications to GTK5 (just like we do for GTK3 applications ported to GTK4).
In order to develop a GTK application.. why does one need to download not only GTK, but MSYS2, then compile tons of code? I would think a few megabytes for the header file and library/dll files.. but instead, after installation/building, my gtk-build folder is over 4GB! Why? I'm interested in using Visual Studio Community, to create a simple c/c++ application that takes data from the serial port and displays it using a GUI I designed in Glade!
You forgot to mention the design decision in gtk3.10 to force all people to the same shortcuts, forcing the US keyboard layouts shortcut keymappings on everyone.. 🤮
Poor GIMP, indeed... by the time GIMP 3.0 is released, whenever that may be, GTK3 will already be end-of-life. I honestly can't imagine GIMP running on a non-deprecated GTK, which it's sad.
@@altrogeruvah Why can't you imagine running GIMP on GTK3? I think the most sensible move would be using Flatpak version in the future, in case GIMP is the only GTK3 app.
Gone? Now yet another GTK version my distro will ship with. I already have v2 v3 and v4 .... so now when the next iteration of Slackware, it will have v5 along with the previous versions because reasons.
The best thing is that it'll keep the tradition of the G(IMP) in GTK being stuck two versions before the main GTK. Though AFAIK the main issue why it's taking so long to jump from Gtk+ to Gtk3 was due to technical debt of customizing their Gtk+ so much that it's been a mess trying to untie them for Gtk3, and once that debt is paid it should be easier to get to Gtk4 and maybe even Gtk5. Honestly, I don't really care since the global appmenu and no-CSD war is already lost on Gtk4 and Gtk3. Nothing for me to care about anymore. Maybe I'd care more if someone did manage to create a gtk4-classic a la gtk3-classic/gtk3-nocsd but as no one evet did, I'm not going to hope that Gtk5 will be better for my preferences than Gtk4. Hoping for Gnome and Gtk Devs to reconsider on their design ideas is a shooting star I'm no longer capable of believing in.
Doesn't GTK4 support app menus? I thought they moves so much stuff from Gtk to Libadwaita in order to keep plain Gtk4 as "Gtk classic", that applications like Gimp can use without following all of Gnome's design trends. Inkscape migrates to Gtk4 right now, and I don't think they have any plans dropping the menu bar. Edit: Oh, you said "global app menu", so do you mean the app menu exported like in Unity? Yeah, I think since Unity's dead, less and less applications are going to support this (even though you can enable this in KDE, but an optional feature in one DE won't be enough for apps to support it).
@@aheendwhz1Yeah. To me, Global Appmenu is great. I don't get why GNOME abandoned it given the amount of empty space on the top panel. I guess it's just convergence and their idea of how it should be approached, but man, both app menu toolbar and global appmenu hooks to go with it are great - even Windows and Apple still use them.
Forking a toolkit is difficult and always results in your project becoming a dead-end. See TDE, stuck on their anicent fork of Qt 3 with no progress in sight.
Just a WM user here. I cannot say i hate Gnome/GTK. They have their place in real world, but they are rushing things. And becos of that, some users might move away. Peace :-)
Why would anyone port their programs to GTK 4 if 5 is coming soon? GIMP, the program for which GTK 1 was written and invented for in the first place, still is GTK2 only and only the next major release this or next year will be GTK3.
Because those changes happen incrementally. The path for porting your app would be one version at a time, as this process is the best documented and therefore easiest. Correct me if I'm wrong.
@@linus. It takes ages to port complex software and doubles the work if they decide to go through each step. And at the time they do it, its already outdated. If GTK5 is ready in a few years, than it would be wise to wait for and port to it directly.
@@thingsiplay I think you don't understand. You just cannot port the app from gtk2 to gtk4 or gtk5. In that case it's easier to rewrite the app from scratch than skip a major version of gtk.
@@Zeioth the application needs to implement libgranite. The name of the variable I don't quite remember, as granite is mostly used on elementaryOS, and you can just change it directly in the settings app.
I only have GTK3. Transmission tried to introduce GTK4 and bunch of its additional dependencies on my computer recently and lost its GUI because of it. I hate that new versions are not backward compatible and that I am expected to have several versions of it.
I use gtk4 apps on i3wm and I def think dropping the X11 backend will decrease its usage, unless Nvidia updates their drivers to function properly on Wayland
It's now working pretty good on GNOME actually, have been using Wayland on Nvidia for 3 months and nothing really broke. Plasma has some bugs (mainly blur-related), if they're gone I'll probably just switch to KDE. Really since Nvidia partially open-sourced their drivers many issues were solved.
@@randomness0 Oh boy are you VERY wrong. For a start AMD GPUs on laptops are not very common outside of APUs and those are generally terribad Vega based GPUs anyway, if you want a half decent laptop you kinda have to buy an Nvidia. Second Nvidia Linux drivers have improved hugely over the last few years, ever since they adopted GBM support and released the open source kernel module things have gotten better very quickly with thee mainline drivers porting many of the open modules fixes. Finally there is only one thing I've encountered that doesn't work well with Nvidia on Linux, that being GDM and Wayland. Honestly I kinda prefer gaming on my laptop over my desktop since my 3060ti Laptop GPU supports DLSS and RTX, both of which work flawlessly under Linux and in many cases my 3060ti can outperform my 5700XT. Edit - Also NVENC/NVDEC is quite simply the best hardware acceleration backend period.
GTK5 isn't in development. GTK4 was as discussed as early as 2016, but didnt come out all the way until December 2020. Nearly 5 years. GTK5 still won't be out for another few years. That said, there probably will be a push to get GTK5 out sooner because GTK4 was outdated very quickly after release. E.g. wayland fractional scaling protocol which GTK4 will never support.
This is strange since most Gnome desktop apps are still GTK3 :P Are they not meant to be the "Flagship" desktop / app suite to showcase the latest GTK versions?
@@WildVoltorb No, like a web server serving normal web pages. And sure I rather use Electron these days it's cheaper to maintain such app, cause it's cross platform, not that Python + GTK is not but I think it's easier to find html + css developers to build the UI than the developer to build with GTK or QT in these era.
Nothing I use even requires GTK4, so it'll be a few years yet before this affects me. Although, as a Slackware user that might prove to be a *lot* of years. I'm kind of considering whether I should just make my own toolkit since GTK seems to be moving away from where I want to be and never really was perfect but just seems to like making breaking changes, and Qt has always been kind of bloated to me, as is C++ in general. As I've been designing and developing my own language I've tried to avoid the pitfalls that everything else hits and chief amongst those is I want to wait until it's truly ready before I release it, but I may need to just suck it up and accept that it'll never be ready without some help.
As a developer I find each new version of GTK more confusing, with less clear documentation. As a user, I can't get my head around why Gnome apps have problems to work well on my Mate-Desktop (considering the shared history). While in contrast each new version of Qt is simpler to develop on and always works well with every desktop.
Before they drop X11 they should really fix GDM not working with Wayland on Nvidia GPU hybrid laptops. Yes I'm aware it was supposed to have been fixed already, its not. Currently I run Gnome on my desktop and Plasma on my laptop because in hybrid mode GDM freaks out, disables Wayland entire with a udev rule and if I override the rule and force GDM into Wayland mode things break (mutter regularly resets randomly, sleep/wake kinda works but sometimes doesn't etc etc).
I keep trying KDE every year, and every year I'm disappointed compared to GNOME. It just doesn't feel as unified somehow... Windows 10/11 has a similar issue. I can't quantify it, it's just a feeling while using the desktop. Maybe KDE 6 will be different, but despite all the problems with the development team, I just love the coziness and "just works" of GNOME. I know that's not everyone's experience, just mine over the years
All of this wayland talk is making me want to get an AMD card ASAP so I can feel safe. I don't use Gnome anymore, but since xorg is no longer being developed, I want to be prepared.
@sergiocuervo3698 That is entirely dependent on which card you have and what driver version you're running. Even then, there are no guarantees. The only thing that closely resembles success with Nvidia Wayland that I had, was with Arch KDE. You can almost forget it with Gnome.
The major thing I have that uses GTK4 is ibus. And DAMMIT, ibus worked with everything until it started using GTK4, now it doesn't work with Firefox at all, it doesn't work with GTK3 apps often, and the whole thing is really annoying. Basically, GTK5 can only make things worse from my frame of reference, unless everyone starts using Gnome. Which is the Gnome way! The Gnome devs in their arrogant self-appointed supremacy know better than you do what you need. They will tell you what you should and shouldn't use and what you do and don't need. If they don't need it, you don't either.
it exists in experimental stage on gnome, it worked ok for my laptop on latest fedora. But it seems to be only gnome not something supported in a good way in gtk, because that is sadly how gnome is developed. On the archwiki look up "HIDPI" and go to GTK
@@Mathias-bz2kr hmm not quite. Fractional scaling in GNOME works by scaling up all the content and then scaling down (e.g. for 150%, the GNOME compositor scales up by a factor of 3 and then downscales by a factor of 2). This can be pretty power intensive. If GTK supported fractional scaling (like Qt does for example) then what would happen is the compositor would tell the GTK application the fractional scale factor and GTK would then redraw the app itself without having to do any upscaling/downscaling.
We will likely not see Gtk5 in many years. Gtk4 will be the main focus for a few year to come. Gtk4 is, if nothing else, much much more performant than Gtk3. And I have only one Qt app installed: OBS (Qt apps have a tendency to randomly crash) , the rest are Gtk3 and Gtk4.
@@Deinorius well, here I am. Maybe it has to do with running qt apps on KDE, but rarely have any crashes. Maybe it's because you haven't tried it in a while? Both Gnome and KDE have made major improvements over the last few years
@@Deinorius The worst part is that it is the toolkit (Qt) that crashes the apps, as the problem exists in all Qt apps, and expresses itself the same way: Use a Dropdown/combobox, and don't click on an item, but dissmiss it, and boom, desktop crash. This is with the Flatpak version of Qt, so it should be quite stable, one would assume.
@@GegoXaren Well, I'd rather ask which apps crash randomly. When did this happen last time? It means nothing that I'm writing I have no crashes at all! Not with Qt or even GTK but as I mentioned before that doesn't say much.
I don't think we, as the Linux OSS community, have the luxury to have major updates this frequently. We bash Microsoft for toolkit inconsistency, but we already do have that in the Linux community; we just forcefully theme apps to look coherent. Developers already shouted at users and maintainers to not theme their apps. A stupid take IMO, just don't hardcode your layout, or force set a theme on your app (this excludes broken distro themes); but we've already fragmented enough. Linux apps are not independent of their environment, unlike Windows, so every bit affects everything. Most of the projects are not funded either, even then no one actually works full-time in these projects. We need every major release to settle down and mature. Otherwise we'll have a Windows 11-like mess.
Completely agree. Both toolkits should do something about this fragmentation before it becomes even worse. And later on we'll even get Cosmic DE with another toolkit... great.
@@Deinorius To be fair to Cosmic, it's not written in C. GTK works with Rust, but it's still much easier to have a toolkit designed with Rust in mind. Iced makes a lot of sense in that regard.
@@Chr0n0s38 Of course, it makes absolutely sense and I'm kinda curious about it when though I won't change from KDE to Cosmic. But it still makes me worried. Another toolkit, maybe a few apps that are really great and you'll even need another toolkit being installed for those. Even on my Steam Deck it's annoying that I have to have specific flatpak versions of KDE or Gnome frameworks/toolkit installed for just one or two apps which each take 500-800 MiB of space. At least I have the 512 GB model. I don't want to imagine how this works with 256 GB and a number of games...
@@Deinorius Honestly, I'd be less worried about the extra framework and more concerned about the entire language behind it. That said, for desktop use I don't think it'll add up that much. The Steam Deck is a different story, but what I would probably do if I had the 256GB option, is add a large SD card to either hold the games, or the flatpaks (realistically it'd be the games, you'd go through 256 quick with just the games).
GTK5 is only just starting to be seriously talked about it's good 3+ years down track for release. By then hopefully Wayland is lot more matured most people have moved away from X11.
On my system, I only have gtk3 installed. No gtk4 or gtk2. So it seems that most of my applications are still using gtk3, and now I hear fuss about gtk5. Very looking forward to see GNOME devs getting death threads (internet). I guess that learning a bunch of terminal applications was indeed the best choice. It seems that the (GNU) + Linux ecosystem has been fumbling for "improvements" ever since the whole Linus Tech Tips fiasco, and now things change quicker than systemd haters replying to comments supporting systemd. No hate towards any developer, who are working on these projects more than on their posture, but with everything coming, My 1X year old brain is very overwhelmed on what will happen with technology in general actually. Whether I will enjoy technology in the future is a question I hope to never have to seriously answer as I want to enjoy technology, but when I see the pessimism in myself, it really feels that this will be a concerning question. This is just another topic that brings up my anxious catharisis, hence why this is more of a ramble than really a view of this news. I apologise.
@@dreamcastspirit1386 There are no low level languages tbh maybe except assembly. This term is really misleading. Most of languages can be both low level and high level rust and cpp being the perfect example.
@@computerfan1079 It's not stagnation this is about. What's the value of development if not many or enough people can enjoy or at least benefit from it. So many comments here about nearly everything using GTK3, Gimp using GTK2 and what's using GTK4 exactly? It's like videogame graphics becoming better and better but because of that you need better and more expensive hardware (and we know how the market still is looking right now), development tools need to be better, you still need exhaustive efforts to make those big games, costs are exploding and after all this where is the fun? When GTK5 releases I'm curious to see how many apps changed even to GTK4. Gimp definitely won't! What's this future where you need to have three different GTK and maybe two Qt versions installed to use all the apps you wish to? I personally would wish for a better regulated (and no, I don't mean "no freedom"!) Linux Desktop.
As a long time Linux user, I'm convinced at this point, that Microsoft has very successfully killed their worst nightmare, Linux desktop usage by the masses, by backdoor funding and controlling the direction of the Gnome and GTK projects. This "crazy conspiracy" idea comes from my refusal to believe a project that developed something as good as Gnome 2, would intentionally trash it, then replace it with something that is the utter steaming pile of shit that Gnome and GTK have become since then. Another reason, look at the contempt the Gnome and GTK project have towards outside development contributions if they don't exactly fall in alignment with the direction and exclusively benefit the Gnome DE. I predicted and wrote years ago, that GTK would eventually end up a "for Gnome only" project. Think how this move leaves hanging, all the Linux GUI applications that rely on GTK3. I'd estimate a safe to guess for this would amount to 35 -40% of all Linux GUI applications will eventually be negatively effected by this.
I don't even know where to start. You have 0 proof of the Microsoft thing, the Gnome team is choosing their own path, times change: so what. If you want to change your desktop, try one of the other DE's like KDE or XFCE. Gnome was never about deep customisation anyway
@@computerfan1079 Problem with that advice is that he could be a programmer who uses GTK to write apps. Since generally if you use GTK you're going to be C only, moving to Qt might be a non-starter. Personally, I'm good either way, but others might not be as multi-lingual.
Don't yell! Things take time. Look at the latest Gnome or KDE. There's no distro using them (I know gnome has a distro, and that's for testing.) And please stop shouting! It's annoying. There are alternatives to both shouting on Youtibe as well as GTK and its alternatives. Stop shouting! I know you're going to be there to shout some more, but I don't like it.
This is strange since most Gnome desktop apps are still GTK3 :P Are they not meant to be the "Flagship" desktop / app suite to showcase the latest GTK versions?
GTK5 is in development, meanwhile GIMP stable is still using GTK2 lol.
Same thought XD
Remember when it used to mean GIMP Toolkit
@@iotku yes, for 2 years🤣
Well... it works fine 😒
If it ain't broke don't "fix" it
Can you tell the difference between GTK-2 & GTK-4 apps ?
(I'll give you 30 minutes to come up with an answer)
EDIT: he didn't
Hi, GTK team member here. Opening the GTK5 development indeed does *not* mean GTK5 is going to be released any time soon; we'll have a few years of development and iterations on the API, especially now that we have platform libraries like libadwaita. It is also true that a development cycle of 9 years is too long: we made decisions early in GTK3, like scaling and text rendering, that do not mesh well with how fast things move, these days. Some things can be done compatibly during a stable cycle, but some cannot. It is untenable to tell people to wait 9 years to address shortcomings encoded in your API. Of course, the two years proposal in 2016 was never going to fly-it was a proposal, after all, and we iterated over it until we published the actual process that we followed for the release of GTK4, and for future releases. The important thing is that once GTK5 is out, GTK4 will be feature frozen (just like GTK3 is these days) and that we will offer migration guides on how to port GTK4 applications to GTK5 (just like we do for GTK3 applications ported to GTK4).
Ebussy
Hopfully morting from 4- 5 is not ging to be sucha dificul task how it was from 2-3 and 3-4
In order to develop a GTK application.. why does one need to download not only GTK, but MSYS2, then compile tons of code? I would think a few megabytes for the header file and library/dll files.. but instead, after installation/building, my gtk-build folder is over 4GB! Why?
I'm interested in using Visual Studio Community, to create a simple c/c++ application that takes data from the serial port and displays it using a GUI I designed in Glade!
Ebussy
You forgot to mention the design decision in gtk3.10 to force all people to the same shortcuts, forcing the US keyboard layouts shortcut keymappings on everyone.. 🤮
Most of my distro’s apps are still on gtk3 XD
some programs still use gtk2
You guys have gtk?
@@xBZZZZyt yeah, gtk2 is still fine for simple apps. The only problem is that it works terrible under the wayland, but hey xwayland exists.
@@carlod1605 For simple apps, they should just be re-implemented in a toolkit that actually gets updates. FLTK exists and has Wayland support
The only issue is a lot of core gnome apps seem to be GTK3 still.
Also poor gimp.
Poor GIMP, indeed... by the time GIMP 3.0 is released, whenever that may be, GTK3 will already be end-of-life. I honestly can't imagine GIMP running on a non-deprecated GTK, which it's sad.
@@altrogeruvah Why can't you imagine running GIMP on GTK3? I think the most sensible move would be using Flatpak version in the future, in case GIMP is the only GTK3 app.
@@thingsiplay Cause it's been on GTK2 since 2004.
@@altrogeruvah GIMP 3 is in development and maybe released this or next year. It's ported to GTK3.
I don't know about Gtk, but generally, version migrations get easier over time, so I imagine that GTK 3 -> GTK 4 is easier than GTK 2 -> GTK 3
Gone? Now yet another GTK version my distro will ship with. I already have v2 v3 and v4 .... so now when the next iteration of Slackware, it will have v5 along with the previous versions because reasons.
GTK devs trying to break API compatibility speed run
At least they're actually using different major versions now but Jesus
It's a different library, a different shared object to link against, there's no breakage
The best thing is that it'll keep the tradition of the G(IMP) in GTK being stuck two versions before the main GTK. Though AFAIK the main issue why it's taking so long to jump from Gtk+ to Gtk3 was due to technical debt of customizing their Gtk+ so much that it's been a mess trying to untie them for Gtk3, and once that debt is paid it should be easier to get to Gtk4 and maybe even Gtk5.
Honestly, I don't really care since the global appmenu and no-CSD war is already lost on Gtk4 and Gtk3. Nothing for me to care about anymore. Maybe I'd care more if someone did manage to create a gtk4-classic a la gtk3-classic/gtk3-nocsd but as no one evet did, I'm not going to hope that Gtk5 will be better for my preferences than Gtk4. Hoping for Gnome and Gtk Devs to reconsider on their design ideas is a shooting star I'm no longer capable of believing in.
I feel your pain
Yeah. It's a shame.
Doesn't GTK4 support app menus? I thought they moves so much stuff from Gtk to Libadwaita in order to keep plain Gtk4 as "Gtk classic", that applications like Gimp can use without following all of Gnome's design trends.
Inkscape migrates to Gtk4 right now, and I don't think they have any plans dropping the menu bar.
Edit: Oh, you said "global app menu", so do you mean the app menu exported like in Unity? Yeah, I think since Unity's dead, less and less applications are going to support this (even though you can enable this in KDE, but an optional feature in one DE won't be enough for apps to support it).
@@aheendwhz1Yeah. To me, Global Appmenu is great. I don't get why GNOME abandoned it given the amount of empty space on the top panel. I guess it's just convergence and their idea of how it should be approached, but man, both app menu toolbar and global appmenu hooks to go with it are great - even Windows and Apple still use them.
Love the 6 on the whiteboard!
Man I am still trying to get over the hangover from GTK3
Ooo I noticed the whiteboard changing through the video. Poor whiteboard, it had trouble spelling GTK. It’s strangely cute.
GTK5 moves to wayland, which in turn lead to Gnome moving to wayland which in turn leads to Ubuntu moving away from Gnome... good times ahead.
ubuntu might move to cosmic :p
I would love a gtk3 fork focused on cinnamon desktop instead of gnome
Forking a toolkit is difficult and always results in your project becoming a dead-end. See TDE, stuck on their anicent fork of Qt 3 with no progress in sight.
Just a WM user here. I cannot say i hate Gnome/GTK. They have their place in real world, but they are rushing things. And becos of that, some users might move away. Peace :-)
thanks for covering this i would like see you talk about QT6 and KDE problem
What problem?
What problem?
Why would anyone port their programs to GTK 4 if 5 is coming soon?
GIMP, the program for which GTK 1 was written and invented for in the first place, still is GTK2 only and only the next major release this or next year will be GTK3.
Because those changes happen incrementally. The path for porting your app would be one version at a time, as this process is the best documented and therefore easiest. Correct me if I'm wrong.
@@linus. It takes ages to port complex software and doubles the work if they decide to go through each step. And at the time they do it, its already outdated. If GTK5 is ready in a few years, than it would be wise to wait for and port to it directly.
GTK actually has a really slow dev cycle, other toolkits it's not unexpected to see a realease every 3 years
@@thingsiplay I think you don't understand. You just cannot port the app from gtk2 to gtk4 or gtk5. In that case it's easier to rewrite the app from scratch than skip a major version of gtk.
@@carlod1605 Why can't you port a GTK2 app to GTK4 directly?
I gonna keep asking for an env var to resize apps properly on GTK until the day I die. Until is not there, I'm gonna prefer QT every time.
Libgranite has one
@@softwarelivre2389 Does the application need to use granite or It is enough installing It? Whats the name on the env var?
@@Zeioth the application needs to implement libgranite. The name of the variable I don't quite remember, as granite is mostly used on elementaryOS, and you can just change it directly in the settings app.
I didn't even know gtk4 was a thing. I keep seeing everything gtk3
I only have GTK3. Transmission tried to introduce GTK4 and bunch of its additional dependencies on my computer recently and lost its GUI because of it. I hate that new versions are not backward compatible and that I am expected to have several versions of it.
I use gtk4 apps on i3wm and I def think dropping the X11 backend will decrease its usage, unless Nvidia updates their drivers to function properly on Wayland
Good, get yourself a good graphics card or get worse support on Linux.
@@randomness0 Okay well Nvidia makes the best graphics cards
@David Calman *the best graphics cards for Windows, there's zero thought put into making their drivers good on Linux.
It's now working pretty good on GNOME actually, have been using Wayland on Nvidia for 3 months and nothing really broke. Plasma has some bugs (mainly blur-related), if they're gone I'll probably just switch to KDE.
Really since Nvidia partially open-sourced their drivers many issues were solved.
@@randomness0 Oh boy are you VERY wrong. For a start AMD GPUs on laptops are not very common outside of APUs and those are generally terribad Vega based GPUs anyway, if you want a half decent laptop you kinda have to buy an Nvidia. Second Nvidia Linux drivers have improved hugely over the last few years, ever since they adopted GBM support and released the open source kernel module things have gotten better very quickly with thee mainline drivers porting many of the open modules fixes. Finally there is only one thing I've encountered that doesn't work well with Nvidia on Linux, that being GDM and Wayland. Honestly I kinda prefer gaming on my laptop over my desktop since my 3060ti Laptop GPU supports DLSS and RTX, both of which work flawlessly under Linux and in many cases my 3060ti can outperform my 5700XT. Edit - Also NVENC/NVDEC is quite simply the best hardware acceleration backend period.
GTK5 isn't in development. GTK4 was as discussed as early as 2016, but didnt come out all the way until December 2020. Nearly 5 years. GTK5 still won't be out for another few years. That said, there probably will be a push to get GTK5 out sooner because GTK4 was outdated very quickly after release. E.g. wayland fractional scaling protocol which GTK4 will never support.
With dockerized dependencies for ui like flatpak I would assume it wouldn't matter to people using gtk1 even
gtk4 has visual inconsistency with adwaita itself, can't wait to see it magnified when gtk5 apps arrives
This is strange since most Gnome desktop apps are still GTK3 :P Are they not meant to be the "Flagship" desktop / app suite to showcase the latest GTK versions?
I use GTK in GImp and Inkscape :D. I used to make Desktop apps in GTK in my youth, but now it's easier to make a web UI than develop Desktop GUI.
Eeeew, like an electron app? Like.. discord? That bloated, disgusting, slow mess? Seriously?
Nowadays, you can also develop desktop GTK applications with Javascript using their implementation called GJS or GNOME Javascript
@@WildVoltorb No, like a web server serving normal web pages. And sure I rather use Electron these days it's cheaper to maintain such app, cause it's cross platform, not that Python + GTK is not but I think it's easier to find html + css developers to build the UI than the developer to build with GTK or QT in these era.
@@UlvicanKahya I rather stick with Python :).
Anyone else remember the nightmare that was the GTK -> GTK2 transition?
What happened there?
9:24 No, you'd be using Flatpak and keep your immutable host clean.
Nothing I use even requires GTK4, so it'll be a few years yet before this affects me. Although, as a Slackware user that might prove to be a *lot* of years. I'm kind of considering whether I should just make my own toolkit since GTK seems to be moving away from where I want to be and never really was perfect but just seems to like making breaking changes, and Qt has always been kind of bloated to me, as is C++ in general. As I've been designing and developing my own language I've tried to avoid the pitfalls that everything else hits and chief amongst those is I want to wait until it's truly ready before I release it, but I may need to just suck it up and accept that it'll never be ready without some help.
As a developer I find each new version of GTK more confusing, with less clear documentation. As a user, I can't get my head around why Gnome apps have problems to work well on my Mate-Desktop (considering the shared history). While in contrast each new version of Qt is simpler to develop on and always works well with every desktop.
on my system only Bottles is using GTK4 the rest are older, granted I don't use many GUI apps these days but still
GNOME Mines is GTK4, same for GNOME Chess.
@@softwarelivre2389 essential pieces of software, how can I forget!
The latest QT is 6.4.2, are you old now
Oh my god I am old
Wonderful. What will they break this time? They broke Nautilus to the bones already.
I dont quite get it
How do these projects and big companies decide when to push a major release, or call it GTK [n+1]?
Before they drop X11 they should really fix GDM not working with Wayland on Nvidia GPU hybrid laptops. Yes I'm aware it was supposed to have been fixed already, its not. Currently I run Gnome on my desktop and Plasma on my laptop because in hybrid mode GDM freaks out, disables Wayland entire with a udev rule and if I override the rule and force GDM into Wayland mode things break (mutter regularly resets randomly, sleep/wake kinda works but sometimes doesn't etc etc).
Same situation, I had to use x11
Me too I love X11 because X11 is richest window system. Wayland has less features but it is very hard to develop with real OpenGL without EGL.
With the power of Python, yes, why NOT?
There was GTK4?
Wait isn't gtk2 stable release?
I wonder what will happen to things like waybar etc when gtk3 support gets dropped
gtk3 will be supported at least for the next 4 years so you can go safe sleep. 4 years is enough time to move to gtk4 or any other toolkit
@@carlod1605 they can't move to gtk4 to my knowledge.
I keep trying KDE every year, and every year I'm disappointed compared to GNOME. It just doesn't feel as unified somehow... Windows 10/11 has a similar issue. I can't quantify it, it's just a feeling while using the desktop. Maybe KDE 6 will be different, but despite all the problems with the development team, I just love the coziness and "just works" of GNOME. I know that's not everyone's experience, just mine over the years
All of this wayland talk is making me want to get an AMD card ASAP so I can feel safe. I don't use Gnome anymore, but since xorg is no longer being developed, I want to be prepared.
@Sergio Cuervo Since when?
@@sergiocuervo3698 still broken on kde 2060
@sergiocuervo3698 That is entirely dependent on which card you have and what driver version you're running. Even then, there are no guarantees. The only thing that closely resembles success with Nvidia Wayland that I had, was with Arch KDE. You can almost forget it with Gnome.
And if you run more than one monitor, you can forget it entirely. It will never remember your monitor configuration.
I think Linux needs to drop Nvidia if they can't get their act together. 🤣
Wait wait wait a minute, Gimp is still using gtk3 😵💫
No it's using GTK2, the GTK3 version is being released soon
@@BrodieRobertson oh yeah, my mistake 🤭
The major thing I have that uses GTK4 is ibus. And DAMMIT, ibus worked with everything until it started using GTK4, now it doesn't work with Firefox at all, it doesn't work with GTK3 apps often, and the whole thing is really annoying.
Basically, GTK5 can only make things worse from my frame of reference, unless everyone starts using Gnome. Which is the Gnome way! The Gnome devs in their arrogant self-appointed supremacy know better than you do what you need. They will tell you what you should and shouldn't use and what you do and don't need. If they don't need it, you don't either.
What does this mean for nvidia graphics card owners? Buy a AMD card ?
Maybe this will mean that gnome apps stop looking so bad
An update to an API does not change the actual theme itself. I don't know what you're talking about.
Gnome apps look sick wtf
Tbh I think GNOME Apps look great with GTK4+libadwaita
Worst take of the year.
No they'll look the same, with too much header bar
GTK fractional scaling support please
it exists in experimental stage on gnome, it worked ok for my laptop on latest fedora.
But it seems to be only gnome not something supported in a good way in gtk, because that is sadly how gnome is developed.
On the archwiki look up "HIDPI" and go to GTK
@@Mathias-bz2kr hmm not quite. Fractional scaling in GNOME works by scaling up all the content and then scaling down (e.g. for 150%, the GNOME compositor scales up by a factor of 3 and then downscales by a factor of 2). This can be pretty power intensive.
If GTK supported fractional scaling (like Qt does for example) then what would happen is the compositor would tell the GTK application the fractional scale factor and GTK would then redraw the app itself without having to do any upscaling/downscaling.
@@jaimiepotts7638 You are probably right, I don't know the details, thanks for the detailed answer :).
We will likely not see Gtk5 in many years. Gtk4 will be the main focus for a few year to come.
Gtk4 is, if nothing else, much much more performant than Gtk3. And I have only one Qt app installed: OBS (Qt apps have a tendency to randomly crash) , the rest are Gtk3 and Gtk4.
That's actually true in my experience, Qt apps tend to be less stable than GTK apps.
I can imagine other people coming around and saying something completely opposite.
@@Deinorius well, here I am. Maybe it has to do with running qt apps on KDE, but rarely have any crashes. Maybe it's because you haven't tried it in a while? Both Gnome and KDE have made major improvements over the last few years
@@Deinorius
The worst part is that it is the toolkit (Qt) that crashes the apps, as the problem exists in all Qt apps, and expresses itself the same way:
Use a Dropdown/combobox, and don't click on an item, but dissmiss it, and boom, desktop crash.
This is with the Flatpak version of Qt, so it should be quite stable, one would assume.
@@GegoXaren Well, I'd rather ask which apps crash randomly. When did this happen last time?
It means nothing that I'm writing I have no crashes at all! Not with Qt or even GTK but as I mentioned before that doesn't say much.
I don't think we, as the Linux OSS community, have the luxury to have major updates this frequently.
We bash Microsoft for toolkit inconsistency, but we already do have that in the Linux community; we just forcefully theme apps to look coherent.
Developers already shouted at users and maintainers to not theme their apps. A stupid take IMO, just don't hardcode your layout, or force set a theme on your app (this excludes broken distro themes); but we've already fragmented enough.
Linux apps are not independent of their environment, unlike Windows, so every bit affects everything. Most of the projects are not funded either, even then no one actually works full-time in these projects. We need every major release to settle down and mature. Otherwise we'll have a Windows 11-like mess.
Completely agree. Both toolkits should do something about this fragmentation before it becomes even worse.
And later on we'll even get Cosmic DE with another toolkit... great.
@@Deinorius To be fair to Cosmic, it's not written in C. GTK works with Rust, but it's still much easier to have a toolkit designed with Rust in mind. Iced makes a lot of sense in that regard.
@@Chr0n0s38 Of course, it makes absolutely sense and I'm kinda curious about it when though I won't change from KDE to Cosmic.
But it still makes me worried. Another toolkit, maybe a few apps that are really great and you'll even need another toolkit being installed for those.
Even on my Steam Deck it's annoying that I have to have specific flatpak versions of KDE or Gnome frameworks/toolkit installed for just one or two apps which each take 500-800 MiB of space. At least I have the 512 GB model. I don't want to imagine how this works with 256 GB and a number of games...
@@Deinorius Honestly, I'd be less worried about the extra framework and more concerned about the entire language behind it. That said, for desktop use I don't think it'll add up that much.
The Steam Deck is a different story, but what I would probably do if I had the 256GB option, is add a large SD card to either hold the games, or the flatpaks (realistically it'd be the games, you'd go through 256 quick with just the games).
Hey, don't forget about enlightenment
GTK5 is only just starting to be seriously talked about it's good 3+ years down track for release. By then hopefully Wayland is lot more matured most people have moved away from X11.
Which is still 3 years quicker than it took GTK4
gimp got a lot of catching up to do
No please not, GTK2 is still the best GTK version.
Or we could...just move along from GTK. (ducking and covering).
The sad truth is that while i am way more enticed by the development model of gtk, it sadly has way worse modus operandi of the core development team.
That's true of so many projects, in my opinion.
It's not pronounced ad-way-ta. Ad-vai-ta. It's a sanskrit word
I need to move away from Fedora so that I don't have to suffer GNOME any further honestly
Why? There are Fedora Spins, Fedora Everything, Fedora Kinoite...
@@alexisfinaris2051 because they are just spins, they have no official support. I have actually installed Kubuntu now just for the desktop
I think GTK is developing too fast. They need to watch out for feature bloat. We don't want another KDE.
On my system, I only have gtk3 installed. No gtk4 or gtk2. So it seems that most of my applications are still using gtk3, and now I hear fuss about gtk5. Very looking forward to see GNOME devs getting death threads (internet). I guess that learning a bunch of terminal applications was indeed the best choice. It seems that the (GNU) + Linux ecosystem has been fumbling for "improvements" ever since the whole Linus Tech Tips fiasco, and now things change quicker than systemd haters replying to comments supporting systemd. No hate towards any developer, who are working on these projects more than on their posture, but with everything coming, My 1X year old brain is very overwhelmed on what will happen with technology in general actually. Whether I will enjoy technology in the future is a question I hope to never have to seriously answer as I want to enjoy technology, but when I see the pessimism in myself, it really feels that this will be a concerning question. This is just another topic that brings up my anxious catharisis, hence why this is more of a ramble than really a view of this news. I apologise.
Learn to program and you will never not love technology. I recommend lower level languages but even stuff like python or lua will always make it fun.
@@dreamcastspirit1386 I don't have the time for it sadly. My school enforces me to use bad tools
@@dreamcastspirit1386 There are no low level languages tbh maybe except assembly. This term is really misleading. Most of languages can be both low level and high level rust and cpp being the perfect example.
Why care so much about which GTK version apps use? And since when has stagnation been a positive?
@@computerfan1079 It's not stagnation this is about.
What's the value of development if not many or enough people can enjoy or at least benefit from it. So many comments here about nearly everything using GTK3, Gimp using GTK2 and what's using GTK4 exactly?
It's like videogame graphics becoming better and better but because of that you need better and more expensive hardware (and we know how the market still is looking right now), development tools need to be better, you still need exhaustive efforts to make those big games, costs are exploding and after all this where is the fun?
When GTK5 releases I'm curious to see how many apps changed even to GTK4. Gimp definitely won't! What's this future where you need to have three different GTK and maybe two Qt versions installed to use all the apps you wish to?
I personally would wish for a better regulated (and no, I don't mean "no freedom"!) Linux Desktop.
Should probably just ask ChatGPT to rewrite gtk3 and gtk4 into RUST.
As a long time Linux user, I'm convinced at this point, that Microsoft has very successfully killed their worst nightmare, Linux desktop usage by the masses, by backdoor funding and controlling the direction of the Gnome and GTK projects.
This "crazy conspiracy" idea comes from my refusal to believe a project that developed something as good as Gnome 2, would intentionally trash it, then replace it with something that is the utter steaming pile of shit that Gnome and GTK have become since then.
Another reason, look at the contempt the Gnome and GTK project have towards outside development contributions if they don't exactly fall in alignment with the direction and exclusively benefit the Gnome DE.
I predicted and wrote years ago, that GTK would eventually end up a "for Gnome only" project.
Think how this move leaves hanging, all the Linux GUI applications that rely on GTK3. I'd estimate a safe to guess for this would amount to 35 -40% of all Linux GUI applications will eventually be negatively effected by this.
I don't even know where to start. You have 0 proof of the Microsoft thing, the Gnome team is choosing their own path, times change: so what. If you want to change your desktop, try one of the other DE's like KDE or XFCE. Gnome was never about deep customisation anyway
@@computerfan1079 Problem with that advice is that he could be a programmer who uses GTK to write apps. Since generally if you use GTK you're going to be C only, moving to Qt might be a non-starter. Personally, I'm good either way, but others might not be as multi-lingual.
Don't yell! Things take time. Look at the latest Gnome or KDE. There's no distro using them (I know gnome has a distro, and that's for testing.)
And please stop shouting! It's annoying.
There are alternatives to both shouting on Youtibe as well as GTK and its alternatives. Stop shouting!
I know you're going to be there to shout some more, but I don't like it.
This is strange since most Gnome desktop apps are still GTK3 :P Are they not meant to be the "Flagship" desktop / app suite to showcase the latest GTK versions?