this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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What even is GTK2 and GTK3?
GTK is a UI toolkit, i.e. a piece of software that draws uniform-looking buttons and scrollbars and the like.
GTK used to stand for "GIMP toolkit" but GTK and GIMP development are now entirely separate, so much so, in fact, that 13 years after the release of GTK 3 and 3 years after the release of GTK 4, GIMP still hasn't upgraded to either.
GIMP's GTK3 port was finished several months ago. What remains to be done for GIMP 3.0 is bug-fixing and porting to the new Plug-in API.
The best way to upgrade to GTK4 is to upgrade to GTK3 first. There was some talk about working on GTK4 soon after GIMP 3.0 is out, but whether that will happen or not is uncertain.
Wait what’s the point of backporting to GTK2 then? And why should I as an end user care? Will it make the UI nicer?
GIMP has been releasing two versions for several years. First, the Stable release, which is the 2.10.x series. Second, the development release, which is the 2.99.x series, which is where the GTK3 work has been done. The work from the development release will culminate in the Stable release reaching 3.0. GIMP will continue to support 2.10.x for some time after 3.0 becomes stable, but eventually they will stop supporting it.
Most of the work right now is focused on the development release and getting GIMP 3.0 stable and ready for release, but they're still doing a little more work to tide users over until 3.0 is out. If you're curious how work on 3.0 is going: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/milestones/27#tab-issues
GTK3 brings Wayland support among other features and yes, it looks nicer. GTK3 is still maintained while GTK2 has been obsoleted, which means bug fixes are still landing. Once they're at GTK3, that makes it much easier to move to GTK4, which brings even better Wayland support (i.e. color management will actually be possible) and a much better UI in my opinion.
13 years, damn...
Because it doesn't need anything in GTK 3 and 4. They're either cosmetic changes or UX changes and Gimp has no reason to adopt either.
GIMP has had a GTK 3 port in development for years. They just lack the developer bandwidth to finish it. And in general, using EOLed libraries for your very popular application is not great, not for security, not for usability, and not for compatibility with modern systems.
Not true. There are tons of things like Wayland support that are only good in GTK3, and even then likely not complete
When the widget toolkit needs explicit and direct support for the graphics server you're doing something very wrong.
The way I see it, GTK is really a framework for building cross-platform GUI apps. Then handling display server compatibility makes perfect sense to me.
If this was meant to be a dig at Wayland, I'm pretty sure GTK also needs explicit and direct support for X11, Windows and MacOS. It just already exists.
It's not a dig at Wayland. You really don't want to have to add specific support for the OS directly in your widget library. There should be an abstraction layer in-between that deals with that. If that layer had been there they wouldn't have to rewrite the whole thing.