Was excited to see a cross-platform app on GTK4 with windows support. Is that true that zrythm is all gtk4 based? It looks great so far.
Except windows seems to be really buggy for me. The UI starts glitching, flickering, freezing, it is generally unusable. I am on pretty standard setup. 12900 with 2080ti, latest nvidia drivers. Is there anything I can do to help debug it? I’m interested in using GTK4 myself but first want to make sure windows support works fine.
Yes, the current release is based on GTK4/libadwaita but current development already switched to QtQuick. See this post for details.
Besides temporary freezing when saving projects or performing undoable actions, those are most likely GTK bugs or missing functionality (the backtraces don’t lead me to believe it’s bugs in Zrythm, and those operations work well on GNU/Linux). No point trying to debug GTK issues IMO - I reported a lot of them, some got fixed, some are on the backlog. Better to focus on the Qt6 port instead.
Besides being a pain to build (dependency on Rust for SVG support, GNU/Linux-only libraries like gettext and appstream for libadwaita, the meson build system itself regularly having bugs on Windows/Mac, etc.) GTK4’s support on Windows and Mac is poor in my experience. A lot of people find Zrythm unusable on Mac and Windows - even for basic operations. I saw you’re having issues on Windows - on Mac things are even worse. To be fair, it could be my fault, but the backtraces I see usually point to bugs in GTK.
The GTK maintainers don’t really care about platforms besides GNU/Linux (dare I say besides GNOME). The general approach about non GNU/Linux platforms seems to be “if it works it works, and if it doesn’t fix it yourself and send patches”. GTK4 has a very nice and well documented API so if you are developing an app for mainly GNOME systems and you don’t care much about cross platform or cross-DE compatibility, or if you are willing to maintain GTK’s Windows and Mac backends yourself, GTK4 is a great choice. But if stable Windows and Mac support is a requirement for you and you don’t want to waste your time as an app developer fixing low level toolkit issues, I wouldn’t recommend it.
Of course this is just my opinion/observation, please don’t take this as a fact.
Aw. That kind of sucks. This seems to be the only complex project that attempted a cross platform app with GTK4. Was thinking I’d even try to debug some of GTK4 to get things fixed in this first before starting on my own effort. I feel like if you stayed on GTK4 longer maybe more people would have stumbled on this and been willing to do the same? I just found it. As I do personally find GTK4 and tooling to be in a better place than QT, just it needs some more people dealing with the multi-platform effort. This could of been something to spearhead more commuinity involvement in cross platform. I feel maybe with how good the apps become on gnome you could have done a call to arms across wider open source community to put pressure on getting GTK4 multi-platform up to par.
“Pressure” does nothing when there are no developers. GTK needs actual Mac and Windows developers. (IMO) RedHat/GNOME foundation doesn’t have much to gain from that so they won’t fund such development. And free software developers are not likely to spend time on Mac/Windows things - these things are usually funded by customers, like in Qt.