GNOME and GTK+ developer Matthias Clasen has announced the release of GTK+ 3.8, the latest version of the GTK+ UI toolkit. A new feature of GTK+ 3.8 is support for the X Server alternative Wayland. The support for touch interfaces was also enhanced and text rendering and theming have been improved. The print dialog can now show printers that were discovered with Avahi if it is configured to do so.

With GTK+ support for Wayland 1.0, the GNOME developers are taking a further step along the road of getting their desktop ready to be ported to the display server technology. In a blog post, Clasen details the current state of Wayland backend, while a wiki page covers how to activate the Wayland backend and the work that needs to be done. It is expected that GNOME Shell will be able to run on Wayland with the release of GNOME 3.10 in autumn.

The theming improvements in GTK+ 3.8 allow developers to set new default fonts that do not override all other settings by default and font sizes can now be assigned relative to each other. Additionally, opacity can now be set for all kinds of elements – previously this could only be set for top-level elements. The new version of GTK+ also includes the Broadway backend server (broadwayd) by default which makes GTK applications accessible from a web browser by using HTML5.

The source code for GTK+ 3.8 is available from the GNOME project's servers under the terms of the LGPLv2.1.

(fab)