Immediately after announcing the final release of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, Matthias Clasen also had the pleasure of informing us about the availability of the GTK+ 3.22 GUI toolkit.

Most of you out there developing GTK+ apps know what this open source software is all about, and the latest stable build is now 3.22, released as part of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment. However, it looks like this will be the last release in the GTK+ 3 series, as the developers are now preparing to bump the development builds to version 3.90.x towards GTK+ 4.0.

"The 3.22 release is the last development release in the GTK+ 3. series. GTK+ 3.22 will be maintained as the long-term stable version of GTK+ 3, and new development will move to the GTK+ 3.90.x releases. To learn more about the GTK+ roadmap, read: https://blog.gtk.org/2016/09/01/versioning-and-long-term-stability-promise-in-gtk," says Matthias Clasen in today's announcement.

Here's what's new in GTK+ 3.22

Prominent new features of GTK+ 3.22 which, as you can see from Matthias Clasen's quote above, will be a long-term supported release, include support for XDG-Shell version 6 and drawing tables to the Wayland backend, new gesture API (Application Programming Interface) for tablet support implemented as GtkPadController, as well as GLES (OpenGL for Embedded Systems) support for the GdkGLContext widget.

Moreover, there's now a new API implemented in the GdkMonitor widget to allow richer information to be parsed about connected outputs, new max-content-width and max-content-height properties have been added to the GtkScrolledWindow widget for improved sizing behavior, and it looks like portals are now being transparently used by various GTK+ APIs when they're in a Flatpak sandbox.

Last but not least, GTK+ 3.22, which you can download right now via our website, comes with a new widget, namely GtkShortcutLabel, which can be used to display keyboard shortcuts similar to the GtkShortcutWindow widget. Of course, there are numerous other small improvements and bug fixes, and we recommend studying the Git changelog for more technical details.