GTK+ 2.8.0 released

No, it shouldn't. These aren't widgets that are useful for a wide range of applications. These are very specialized widgets. Of course it makes sense to share them between audio/video applications but that only means that they should be in their own library, surely not in the toolkit itself. If you think that such widgets are important to have, why don't you start a gtk-multimedia-widgets project?

What you speak of is more in gstreamers domain that gtk itself.

You knew well that GTK+ 2.8 using cairo is something new, and it requires some time to perfect it? Nothing is ever perfect on the first release...Oh, and about the speed: while I got 30s in gtkperf using some 2.6.x series GTK+, I get 33s with 2.8.0. It's not really that big of a difference. So, speedwise were doing still quite fine, but visually I did not see _any_ difference. Hmm. I just wish they did use glitz for everything, so maybe the performance would improve over the previous versions. Well, hopefully in the future...
-WereCat

A 10% increase on the first release means that it is very likely that gtk+ 2.8 will become faster than 2.6 over the next months. A 10% slowdown is something that should be relatively easy to cope with by means of optimization. Things would be bad if the slowdown was something like 100%.

...I partially agree. However, the memory reduction team for GNOME was established about half a year ago, and GTK+ identified as a major bottleneck (hurray!). I really like GTK+, it looks nice, it has a really good and straightforward API (IMHO) and language bindings for almost anything out there. The only thing that bothers me is, yes, the performance and/or memory footprint.

Unfortunately you're somewhat right when you say that "Owen Taylor never listened." I've never had that experience myself, but read alot about this problem. Oh well...

Bah. People need features more than speed.

Otherwise OOo would have been abandoned long ago.

...but it doesn't mean anything in this context. So, why are you asking? In percentage it seems like a big number, but a difference of 3 seconds is _nothing_. I didn't notice any difference at all compared to the previous version, unless I explicitly ran gtkperf. In normal use it was just the same.

Of course, I think they should speed it up, but I am not going to whine about the performance already a few days after it is released! I happen to have some common sense and self-control to have the patience and wait a while. If the next release doesn't have any improvements, then I'd say it would be a good time to remind them. Still, whining about such doesn't help anything, it only irritates people!

Oh, and how can you call them bozo developers if you can't do anything better than them? I think GTK+ is quite good; it looks good, is very customizable, has alot of useful widgets and easy-to-use API...Let me see you do something even half as good.
-WereCat

floss projects are dictatorships, they would fail if they weren't due to adding millions of useless features and listening only to those who whine the loudest.

I don't get it, this new version antialiases everything while the previous version only antialiased text. Did you think that change would be free?

Just don't use Cairo if you want the same speed as the older version.

except many things in gtk are actually faster with cairo than without. run gtkperf for proof

Debian enables Glitz as the Cairo Backbend by default

Hi, could you share with us knowledge what exactly and by how much is slower than in previous released? Which widgets, what action, how much time is needed in 2.6 and 2.8. Please attach information about theme you are using to benchmarks you post.
Hard numbers, please.

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:wq

Install gtkperf, or try checking the numbers posted on Osnews´ article.

There is no really much difference on a medium performance pc. With Glitz enabled it will be faster.

The first comment is very funny, but I agree it does have some sort of truth in it.

glitz is a cairo backend, it is not part of Gtk+. It is configured when you compile cairo, AFAIK. No changes to Gtk+ are needed.