Arch Linux

kokoko3k

Member

Registered: 2008-11-14

Posts: 2,426

How qt/gtk should behave (rant inside!)

Do you ever seen the shiny new blender interface?
It is totally opengl, fast, reactive, supports alpha blend, does vsync, you can drag vsplitters on a screen full of widgets and everything autoresize itself instantly.
Also,the whole program starts in less than a second.

I wonder why it seems so difficult to have this with qt or gtk...

PS: I also wonder is it not possible to open a new thread in TGN ?

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,328

Re: How qt/gtk should behave (rant inside!)

PS: I also wonder is it not possible to open a new thread in TGN ?

Nope.  But for this thread, lets try Arch Discussion GNU/Linux Discussion for now.

Last edited by ewaller (2011-05-18 22:01:15)

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stqn

Member

Registered: 2010-03-19

Posts: 1,191

Website

Re: How qt/gtk should behave (rant inside!)

One answer might be that Gtk and Qt have to work everywhere (even without OpenGL) and also keep the compatibility with thousands of applications. Not sure if that applies to Gtk3 though.

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,358

Re: How qt/gtk should behave (rant inside!)

I doubt application startup speed has much to do with using qt/gtk, most of the time is spent by the application itself rather than the widgets, especially if loading a gtk app on gnome (with all libraries already in memory).

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MurdersLastCrow

Member

Registered: 2010-10-04

Posts: 74

Re: How qt/gtk should behave (rant inside!)

http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/05/09/tho … bout-qt-5/
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2010/11/2d-musings.html

Seems like a lot of developers agree with you, and this may be something big with GTK 3 if things go smoothly enough with llvmpipe. According to those blogs, Qt 5 will support largely what you have described, among other features that will make it even more resource-friendly than it is now (many people misinterpret Qt's performance based on KDE, since that's the only experience they've had with it outside of Google Earth or Skype- quite simply, that's like comparing GTK's performance to Ubuntu rather than to Xfce4 or Gnome 3 Fallback).

So, the main issue has always been that there isn't a dependable form of 3D acceleration on a very basic level that can be expected, at least for some widget rendering. But now with llvmpipe, we might have a minimal amount of support that makes it more reasonable to use acceleration globally across the entire Linux stack.

Linux is already fast as all get out without these improvements, mind you (KDE 4 is still lighter than OS X's latest versions of Aqua), so imagine what this could do for hardware support and software performance overall. Not to mention that, even without llvmpipe, it's becoming more and more difficult to come across Linux users on the desktop without some form of 3d accleration out of the box.

So never fear- it's coming. As Qt 5 catches on over the following years in the KDE project, it will make the issues with GTK even more obvious (although GTK 3 is a huge improvement over GTK 2, in my opinion). Graphics are a pretty hot topic- the main issue is with the shortage of the amount of developers who know enough to work it fo free, or in cooperation with Red Hat/SUSE/Intel/etc.

kokoko3k

Member

Registered: 2008-11-14

Posts: 2,426

Re: How qt/gtk should behave (rant inside!)

Thanks for your links, let's hope for the best then!

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