Gtk4 and Wayland

[Johan Vos]

Hi Thiago,

I was thinking (and experimenting) in the same direction, and so far that
is working good. I don't see disadvantages, but it would be good to find
out about it before we move forward.
Maybe the main issue to me is that GTK comes with lots of dependencies. We
already have that situation today, so it is not going to be worse. But if
we would use the Wayland protocol on a lower level (with a Wayland-specific
glass platform, instead of GTK), we could probably reduce the dependencies.
However, this comes at the price of creating *and maintaining* more
low-level code.

I've been running GTK3 on Wayland and that works fine too. However, it
might be better to focus Wayland support for GTK4. I think there won't be
many installs that have no X11, but only Wayland, and that have GTK3 and no
GTK4.

- Johan
- Johan

On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 11:03 PM Thiago Milczarek Sayão <
thiago.sayao at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I did some investigation on gtk4 and wayland.
>
> After some research I ended up with the conclusion that the best way is to
> do a separate gtk4 backend, that would support X11 and Wayland.
>
> This would be a good start:
> https://github.com/openjdk/jfx/pull/77/files
>
> Why?
>
> Gtk4 moves the decoration to the client side, which is GREAT since knowing
> the window size with decoration was a real pain.
>
> We probably won't want to do all the decoration work, Gtk does that, but on
> GtkWindow level, not GdkSurface (which replaces GdkWindow).
>
> Thus the move to use "more Gtk" (hence "less Gdk") which is exactly what
> the PR does. It also removes Applet code
>
> This is also a good starting point:
> https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/gtk/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html
>
> --Thiago.
>