GTK announces X11 deprecation in GTK 5, new experimental Android backend, and much more

The GTK development team has announced the deprecation of the X11 and Broadway backends in their latest blog post. This move anticipates the planned removal of X11 in GTK 5, although it remains available for now. Broadway, having never advanced beyond its experimental stage, is being phased out due to lack of maintenance.

Additionally, the minimum system requirements for GTK have been updated, now supporting only Windows 10 and macOS 10.15 or later, with the GTK developers mentioning that “having to deal with a maze of ifdefs and unavailable APIs makes development harder than it should be”. The old GL renderer has also been removed, impacting users with outdated drivers and hardware.

GTK 4.18 introduces solutions for pointer size issues on Wayland with fractional scaling, eliminating oversized pointers. Accessibility also receives a significant boost with the introduction of the AccessKit backend, offering accessibility features on Windows and macOS for the first time. The AT-SPI (Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface) backend is still the default on Linux, and has seen a number of improvements as well.

Furthermore, GTK now includes an experimental Android backend, which may present some initial challenges as it continues to develop.