GTK Drops X11!
And Broadway Support, Lays the Foundation for New Android Backend
GTK is a proven open source toolkit for building intuitive graphical user interfaces for Linux, Windows, and macOS, providing developers and designers with a loaded set of libraries and tools for building windows, buttons, menus, etc.
It's the driving force behind the interfaces of many popular offerings like GNOME, Cinnamon, GParted, Firefox, and more.
Coinciding with FOSDEM 2025, the GTK team has announced that they are dropping support for two of their backends and adding a new one that is in the initial stages of development.
X11 And Broadway Out, Android In
The two deprecation merge requests by Matthias Clasen of the GTK development team.
Done in preparation of the future GTK 5 release, the X11 backend and the Broadway backend have been deprecated with the following justifications:
For X11, the backend API was retired to send a clear message of its removal in GTK 5. Broadway, on the other hand, remained experimental and never matured beyond that stage, with lack of maintenance sealing its fate.
In a similar vein, the minimum required versions for Windows and macOS have been raised to Windows 10 and macOS 10.15 respectively, with the GTK developers mentioning that it was becoming difficult to handle outdated APIs and a “maze of ifdefs”.
They have also decided to remove the old OpenGL renderer, acknowledging that this may disappoint users with older drivers and hardware. However, they are committing to optimize the new renderers for supported hardware.
It's not all bad news, though; there are improvements to the Atspi backend that improve accessibility on Linux, and a new AccessKit backend has been brought in to enable accessibility support on Windows and macOS.
Moreover, thanks to the work of GTK developer Florian "sp1rit", there is now a new experimental Android backend implementation that has the end goal of being merged upstream one day.
In its current state, the experimental backend has been made to work with Android 12.0 (SDK 31), but with many missing features and several bugs. If you are looking for a super early look at how a GTK Android app looks/feels, then you can refer to the merge request linked above. It includes two APK files for Florian's Fidei app that can be installed via ADB.
The announcement blog is a must-read if you would like to learn more.
💬 Your thoughts? Will you migrate your application to GTK 5 when it's out?
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