GTK's X11 Backend Now Deprecated, Planned For Removal In GTK 5

GTK developers have been holding another hackfest this week for the annual FOSDEM developer conference happening this weekend in Brussels. GTK developers are working toward the GTK 4.18 stable release and continuing to think more about GTK 5.

In a blog post today on the GTK project blog, they noted as part of their spring cleaning they have removed their old OpenGL renderer given the successes of their newer renders. GTK developers have also made the move to deprecate their X11 and HTML5 Broadway backends. Broadway was a nifty back-end for outputting to modern HTML5 for GTK apps within web browsers but ultimately not much use. GTK developers previously talked about deprecating their X11 support in favor of Wayland and that has now taken place.

GTK 4.17.4 was released today and it goes ahead with the X11 and Broadway backend deprecation. Meanwhile new to GTK 4.17.4 is an Android back-end: GTK apps can now work natively on Android smartphones but for the time being is considered experimental. GTK 4.17.4 also adds support for rotated videos with GtkVideo, fixes many bugs, and other enhancements.

GTK developers are planning on removing the now-deprecated X11 and Broadway back-ends for the GTK 5 toolkit release.

On the GTK blog they also outline other spring cleaning like dropping support for prior to Windows 10 and macOS 10.15. Plus other development work with their sights on the GTK 5 toolkit.