voctogui: does a gtk4 port make sense?

[jane400]

Recent developments with GTK4 look interesting, especially the Graphics offload revisted blogpost, where gstreamer (gst-plugins-rs) also gained support for recently in the gtk4paintablesink. This would also fix our X11 dependency for voctogui, as we could to switch to wayland and maybe even have zero-copy playback (if there are no hardware quirks on those laptops 🙃).

It would be a larger undertaking as things like Shortcuts have a new API, but it should be doable.

The more pressing questions are: Does it make sense? As @Kunsi and @sophieschi contributed recently: are you comfortable with GTK4? I think I have the skills to port it (I don't know GTK3 that well anymore tho), but other people should still be able to contribute.

[Kunsi]

I don't have any preference on GTK3 or GTK4, so i'm fine either way.

We need to make sure we stay compatible with atleast the following operating systems:

• debian stable
• Ubuntu LTS (all supported versions, so down to 20.04 currently)
• Arch Linux

Also, we need to have compatibility for x11. Gaining wayland support sounds like a nice addition.

(Side note: Switching from GTK3 to GTK4 would probably be considered a breaking change according to semver, which means we'd have to release 3.0.0 then)

[jane400]

Hmm, Ubuntu LTS is annoying, those things were only recent additions. (also wayland support can probably also be done with gtk3.)

Also note, that there isn't a direct glade port for GTK4. There is this replacement tho: https://gitlab.gnome.org/jpu/cambalache

The probably only advantage with GTK4 & X11 is that the GUI is rendered on the GPU instead of the CPU. I just hope x11 backend in gtk4 is working good enough for voctogui.