"GNOME theme engine designer Andrea Cimitan has implemented support for transparent widgets in the Murrine GTK theme engine, bringing Vista-like translucent glass effects to the GNOME desktop. Cimitan used RGBA colormaps to implement the feature and says that, with only 10 or 20 extra lines of code, translucency can easily be added to other theme engines that support RGBA. Cimitan says that the addition of translucency effects proves that critics of GTK are wrong. "[I]n the last week I've seen a lot of people claiming about 'lacks' of Gtk+ capabilities," wrote Cimitan in a blog entry. "Some of them still think that Gtk+ doesn't have RGBA support... Or it will require nasty hacks. This is absolutely false."
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Member since:2006-06-03
Member since:2007-02-17
I think cairo would be sped up considerably if they used the opengl backend to accelerate it liek they planned. If you use gtk on X I think it uses xlib for the rednering backend, but there is no reason why most of this couldn't be offloaded to the compositing manager at some point if it isn;t already being done.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-10-02
Member since:2005-07-24
Actually using Cairo speeds up the themes...
Not in my experience, and I doubt benchmarks (gtkperf?) show otherwise. I remember how much slower GTK+ suddenly became after the Cairo switch in 2.6. It was slow in the 2.0-2.4 versions, too, but since 2.6, it's been really slow.
Member since:2005-07-06
Actually using Cairo speeds up the themes...
I cannot see how, since all the GDK routines are generally faster and more mature than their Cairo equivalents. Cairo hasn't caught up here. GDK is just more mature and faster at bilinear filtering, and stuff like transformations and alike.
I've also seen Cairo's software fallbacks turn out to be terrible really. They're certainly not as good as GDK performance-wise, which is probably why people are talking about doing what they can through GDK now.
There's not really a whole lot of incentive for themes to move wholesale to Cairo, which takes new code, time and effort and may well turn out to not be worth it performance-wise.
Member since:2005-07-24
100% agreed. GTK+ is painfully slow. Yes, it is a modern toolkit with many modern features, but the performance suffers. It is quite OK for simple apps, but as long as the window layout gets more complicated, with tabs, lists, progress bars, spin buttons etc., it gets quite CPU-hungry. Especially the Cairo integration in 2.6 made it really slow. General (re)drawing performance is poor (and has always been poor in GTK+ 2.x) this can be seen in many graphics apps), switching between tabs in dialogs is visibly slow (I can see the individual widgets being drawn to the tab), resizing has always been slow, scrolling in large lists is slow, context menus are slow (more CPU intensive than in other toolkits) etc.
Yes, using these big apps on Linux (as opposed to MS Windows) is painful exactly because the GUI runs like molasses.
Member since:
2005-07-08
The problem of GTK is that it's over-engineered. Conceptually, everything is ok. Every behaviors of the toolkit is well thought. However, the end result is much less exciting. A simple resizing operation causes a zillion fonction calls. Most GTK theme engines are unacceptably slow (the fact that they are almost all based on Cairo now is one of the causes for this). In a corporate environnement, I think people can live with that. For the rest of the world, I think it's not something you want. I have 2 computers here, one running XP and one running Gusty, and I see a huge difference between both setup even when doing the same exact task. For example, SWT/Windows is so much faster than SWT/GTK. Using Eclipse on Windows is so much more enjoyable than using it on Linux. Honestly, having Gnome, Evolution, Firefox, Eclipse and OOo running at the same time isn't something pretty even on a high-end computer. I know we can't blame GTK for everything but it doesn't help.