GTK 4.4 Released With Continued NGL Improvements, Inspector By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GTK 4.4 Released With Continued NGL Improvements, Inspector By Default

GTK 4.4 is out as the latest stable update to the GTK4 open-source toolkit...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK-4.4-Released

[remenic]

"Our GL support works fine with the latest NVidia driver."

It's odd that this is mentioned explicitly and interesting that they say "fine" and not "great".

[mirmirmir]

*insert mandatory complain about filepicker here*

[lumks]

*insert mandatory complain about filepicker here*

*insert mandatory hint that it is a community project and someone who cares should do the work*

[ssokolow]

*insert mandatory complain about filepicker here*

[FONT=monospace]export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1[/FONT]

(Sure, not everything's using FileChooserNative yet, but it definitely helps.)

[uid313]

Is it possible to use GTK 4 with Python GOBject Introspection (GI) yet?

I like GTK and think GTK 4 seems like a nice improvement over GTK 3 which was pretty good but had some things that could be better.

[You-]

"Our GL support works fine with the latest NVidia driver."

It's odd that this is mentioned explicitly and interesting that they say "fine" and not "great".

AFAIK the new driver drops the EGLStreams window system integration to something similar to what upstream were saying around 5-10 years ago which nVidia refused, so this is referring to the "normal" code paths being tested and made to work with the new nVidia drivers.

[Shiba]

Are the fonts still broken?

[brent]

Yeah, text rendering is a major issue, unless you got a HiDPI display. Basically, GTK 4 is stuck in an idealized "perfect scalable layout" world: text rendering is always grayscale only and with no hinting or grid-fitting whatsoever. It's actually worse than the status quo, not even the line height seems to be grid-fitted. It's fine if you have 200+ DPI screens, but the reality is... we still have MANY low-ish DPI screens and they will not go away any time soon. And on those screens, it's a quite blurry and badly readable experience. But at least it's fast to render and easy to implement (sigh). And here's the ugly, the motivation for this "perfect layout" thing is GOOD: getting rid of grid-fitting in some cases (e.g. horizontal advance) can really improve the quality, you finally can get proper letter spacing for instance. But GTK 4 is simply too forceful, goes all-in on the concept and ignores reality.

The reality is of course complex: different rendering preferences are required, depending on usage. If you want to animate text, you can't use any grid-fitting or hinting. On the other hand, if you want legible, sharp text on low-DPI screens, you need *some* hinting, grid-fitting and subpixel rendering.

The whole thing is being discusse at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787. Improvements are going to come, but the stubbornness of some developers is mind-boggling...

End of rant.

[chocolate]

Yeah, text rendering is a major issue, unless you got a HiDPI display. Basically, GTK 4 is stuck in an idealized "perfect scalable layout" world: text rendering is always grayscale only and with no hinting or grid-fitting whatsoever. It's actually worse than the status quo, not even the line height seems to be grid-fitted. It's fine if you have 200+ DPI screens, but the reality is... we still have MANY low-ish DPI screens and they will not go away any time soon. And on those screens, it's a quite blurry and badly readable experience. But at least it's fast to render and easy to implement (sigh). And here's the ugly, the motivation for this "perfect layout" thing is GOOD: getting rid of grid-fitting in some cases (e.g. horizontal advance) can really improve the quality, you finally can get proper letter spacing for instance. But GTK 4 is simply too forceful, goes all-in on the concept and ignores reality.

The reality is of course complex: different rendering preferences are required, depending on usage. If you want to animate text, you can't use any grid-fitting or hinting. On the other hand, if you want legible, sharp text on low-DPI screens, you need *some* hinting, grid-fitting and subpixel rendering.

The whole thing is being discusse at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787. Improvements are going to come, but the stubbornness of some developers is mind-boggling...

End of rant.

Easy comparison for the lazy (I feel you). Taken from that thread.