The GTK project's development blog, where maintainers post about releases, rendering changes, and stability and versioning plans.
Commenters use it to explain GTK's release and API-break policy, such as why changes must wait for a new major version, and to discuss rendering and scaling.
>I'm not going to stop you from pretending like nothing is wrong if that's your prerogative.
Please don't jump to this conclusion, I'm not doing that. If some GTK3 users want to continue developing GTK3 or use some other toolkit then that's absolutely fine with me. I said that before, I could even recommend some other toolkits for you to use. But I think it's a bad idea to view GTK3 as some kind of resistance against GTK4 because that's missing out on many years of improvements that would be very difficult to backport. Yes there are bugs in GTK4, but I've also talked to the developers and they are aware of them and are working on solving the issues even if progress seems slow. You can read some of the GTK4 blogs to see some of the enhancements that were made in GTK4 and decide if they're worth it to you or not: https://blog.gtk.org/2020/12/16/gtk-4-0/
>I'm letting you know here and now that there is an expanding sentiment among developers that GTK4 is a regression from GTK3
This is not really surprising or new or that much of a big deal, people complained when GTK2 was released because it changed stuff from GTK1, then they complained when GTK3 was released because it changed stuff from GTK2. It's totally understandable and normal for some to want to avoid or delay making the switch, but many others have been willing to make it for the improvements.
>Every attempt I've made to reach out to developers has either gone cold or been rejected. The current leadership has made…
GTK doesn't use semantic versioning.
Every uneven minor version is a development cycle, every even minor version is a stable cycle.
And as it happened so often, every dev cycle things broke down, because of intertwined dependencies of GTK, gjs and glibc (and gobject introspection bindings).
See also: https://blog.gtk.org/2016/09/01/versioning-and-long-term-stability-promise-in-gtk/
I also think you're kind of proving my point. If the project that is supposed to be _the demo use case_ of the _GIMP Tool Kit_ and needs more than a decade to update its scenes, views, and widgets...then maybe this is not the right toolkit for anyone, because pretty much every CEO will go rogue when they see the development time needed to port anything to GTK.
And it doesn't have to be like that. It's an architecture design decision they made, where they also chose vala as their own NIH programming language to integrate things over other more established options.
Same goes for glibc and gjs which meanwhile has so many bugs I can probably exploit it with a heap spraying exploit from 10 years ago, as it conceptually is yet another hard forked project inside the GNOME ecosystem which can never be updated with its upstream project dependencies/origins.
My point is that the GNOME project introduced maintenance burden upon themselves, and that's what's killing the GTK ecosystem. And they themselves could have avoided that.
(Apart from the outdated documentation whose example demos don't even…
What have years and years of criticising and pointing-at brought us, other than a couple of burnt-out devs?
And is there anywhere where we can see that this elite leadership suddenly changed their minds on allowing this, rather than a developer seeing an opportunity when a bunch of things got deprecated, which had been postponed for a long time because it creates a lot of work for downstreams [0]?
Or is the fact that they didn't want to haphazardly break those downstreams the poor leadership you speak of?
[0] https://blog.gtk.org/2022/12/15/a-grid-for-the-file-chooser/
> GTK apps under KDE can act a bit funny too, with e.g. your cursor drawing at 2x when hovering over a GTK window.
Yea, GTK4 to my knowledge until now doesn't support fractional scaling, but the new™ ngl and vulkan renderers should be able to do fractional scaling. If it's actually hooked up to do so is another question.
https://blog.gtk.org/2024/01/28/new-renderers-for-gtk/
The accessibility system in GTK is being redesigned in GTK4: https://blog.gtk.org/2020/02/17/gtk-hackfest-2020-roadmap-and-accessibility/
The changes should make it similar to the way Qt works and should make it easier to plug in a Windows/Mac a11y backend. If there is interest in implementing/maintaining this then please help out if you're able.
Well spotted. Following this, I found opening each image in a new tab and switching between them worked as a nice way to compare.
For convenience (second is hinted)
+ https://blog.gtk.org/files/2024/03/Screenshot-from-2024-03-06-21-44-21.png
+ https://blog.gtk.org/files/2024/03/hinting-125.png
You can really spot the difference.