GTK 4.0 Officially Released After More Than 4 Years of Development

GTK 4.0

The GTK development officially released today the next generation of the GTK toolkit, GTK 4.0, after being in development for more than four years.

As you can imagine, GTK 4.0 is a massive update and a huge milestone for the development of the open-source and cross-platform GTK widget toolkit, which is used for creating graphical user interfaces, also known as GUIs, for Linux apps. GTK is mostly used by the GNOME Project for the GNOME desktop environment and related apps.

GTK was previous referred to as GTK+, but with this release the + was dropped and the toolkit’s name is now simply GTK. GTK 4.0 is the future of the toolkit, enabling application developers to build astonishing graphical user interfaces for GTK apps, as well as the next major version of the GNOME desktop environment.

“GTK 4.0 is the result of a lot of hard work by a small team of dedicated developers,” said Matthias Clasen. “We’ve added over 18.000 commits and made more than 20 development releases.”

Highlights of GTK 4.0 include media playback, drag and drop support, layout managers and transforms, scalable lists and grids, support for shaders, event controllers, render nodes, data transfers, and improved accessibility. For more details and examples of these new features you should check out the announcement page.

GTK 4.0 is considered a stable release and it’s ready for the masses. However, the GTK development team will still continue updating the GTK+ 3.x series, which is currently used by numerous projects, but the older GTK+ 2.x series has now reached end of life and developers are urged to port their apps to GTK+3 or GTK 4.0.

As you can imagine, the upcoming GNOME 40 desktop environment will mostly be powered by GTK 4.0. This translates to more beautiful interfaces and a much better overall experience. As for the version number, you now know why GNOME switched to 40 as its new numbering scheme instead of 4.0.

Image credits: The GNOME Project

Last updated 3 years ago

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