14 DAY TRIAL // While the GNOME Project tries to bring new features and functionality to the GNOME desktop environment, work on the massive GTK+ 4 open-source GUI toolkit, which is used for building GTK+ apps for GNOME, continues in the background.
A new milestone was released recently, GTK+ 3.91.0, which adds quite a bunch of improvements and bug fixes, but also some new APIs and compatibility with other supported operating systems besides those based on the Linux kernel. For example, GTK+ 3.91.0 implements initial support for Apple's macOS platform, which will make it possible to run apps written in GTK+ 4 on OS X.
Another highly anticipated feature is support for building GTK+ with the Meson build system, which is being adopted by more and more open source projects these days. Moreover, GTK+ 3.91.0 introduces a new API (Application Programming Interface) called gtk_widget_insert_before/after, and removes the expand and fill child properties from GtkBox, as well as the angle property from GtkLabel.
The GtkWindow widget appears to have lost its hide-titlebar-when-maximized property in the GTK+ 3.91.0, which removes the compat keysym definitions and the center child support from the GtkBox widget. Other than that, a lot of bugs have been squashed and a few language translations updated. If you're into technical details, you can find the full changelog attached at the end of the article.
Wayland support improved in GTK+ 3.91.0
Support for the next-generation Wayland display server was improved as well in GTK+ 3.91.0 by increasing key delivery verbosity, addressing some harmless Clang warnings and a memory leak that occurred when exporting handle. Judging by all these changes, it might be possible for GTK+ 4 to land just in time for the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment this September, but no release date was published yet.
If you can't wait any longer for GTK+ 4 to hit the streets, you can download the GTK+ 3.91.0 source tarball right now from our website to compile it on your favorite GNU/Linux distro. However, we have to warn you that you shouldn't install this development release in a stable, production-ready environment. We'll keep you guys updated with the latest GTK+ 4 news as soon as we know more.