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GTK+ 2.8.0 released

Submitted by sanmarcos on Sun, 2005-08-14 21:07. GTK

GTK+2.8.0 has just been released. New features in this version include, most notably, support for the Cairo vector graphics library for rendering most of GTK's traditional widgets with antialiasing, as well as bringing graphics capabilities like the ability to create antialiased shapes, and apply alpha blending and gradients. You can download it from here, and see the release notes here.In other words, this release allows for engine and theme developers to exploit the new OpenGL accelerated (if Cairo was compiled with Glitz support) eye-candy capabilities.

In other news, the Clearlooks engine and theme, the new default them for GNOME 2.12, already has begun work for a version supporting the Cairo library. Screenshots can be seen here.

Dude! Where's your brain

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2005-08-21 08:06.

What's your problem?

I though that was perfectly obvious by now. I'm annoyed by the fact that GTK2 gets slower with every release. That the developers have never listened or responsed to any criticism -- be it well-reasoned, backed up by numbers or in conjuction with patches. I'm annoyed that virtually every promise ever made for GTK2 has been broken... and that people like you still make up excuses for them.

Do you have any social skills, or do you like hiding behind the anonymity of your computer?

Says the man posting anonymously.

You may, and probably do, have a valid complaint. But you vehement ranting, name calling, and general rudeness does not make people want to sympathize with you.

I don't care whether you sympathize or not.

First of all, if you had a project and somebody said "You're code sucks you idiot, you should optimize it" would you listen to them?

No, but then I would listen to reasoned criticism backed up by numbers -- which the GTK2 have never done. If I didn't and spent years blaming everyone else for my own failings on a critical part of the GNOME infrastructure, I wouldn't be too surprised to get flamed.

Would you accept a patch if it broke something, didn't meet coding standards, or complicated the api? If you really want to help out, get some real numbers for specific parts of the toolkit that are the problem, such as "When I create a treeview with 10,000 entries with cell renderer type x and with fixed height/width it uses this amount of RAM and takes this many seconds to move the focus halfway down the list." This is the kind of feedback developers need for optimization. A simple "Gtk is 3 seconds slower than the last release" doesn't help at all.

Have you been following GTK development at all? I suggest you check their bugzilla -- all the detail you could wish for why GTK2 is unusable in situations where performance is critical... usually under the heading "WONTFIX", shame there's no tag for "PASSTHEBUCK" because it would be extremely common on GTK's bugzilla.

Second, the kernel cares about minute optimization because it is the direct interface to the hardware. Bottlenecks in scheduling or latency vastly affect the entire system. People use it for mission critical servers, real-time applications, and clustering in addition to desktop usage. Resource usage in Gtk has nowhere near the same effect.

You are trying to put GTK on the same level as an application. This isn't a word processor -- every single GNOME app bottlenecks heavily on GTK2. So do things like eclipse, and mozilla.

Optimization is a worthy goal, but it is not a primary goal, especially when there are still some much greater problems with respect to the linux desktop.

What a bizarre are utterly worthless argument. There are other things wrong with GNOME, so let's not criticize GTK for getting slower and crapper with every release.

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