`gtk3` track request for `Pinta`

store-requests
1

Hello store,

Could I please have a GTK3 track for Pinta. This would be a one off thing as the app is transitioning to GTK4 with libadwaita, which will land in latest/stable. Most people will be fine, but, anticipating future requests, I think there could be a subset of people who like the current GTK3 release due to things like theming, or specific quirks such as the GTK4 backend being slightly more inefficient in certain operations where GTK3 works fine (which isn’t a common use-case, but some issues have been seen already).

The Pinta snap is tiny and well sandboxed; Pinta itself only contains .NET and Pinta; everything else is in the base/content snaps, and there isn’t any networking except user initiated file access. So whilst the GTK3 release is effectively going to be unmaintained; it’d still get 10 years of security support for the underlying stack (including even e.g the image encoders/decoders which are pixbuf-loaders in the Gnome extension, and .NET itself, which is in the Main repository), and quite likely I’d even be able to trivially upgrade it to Core26/28 and get 10 years on those too, so I hope this is a reasonable ask :slight_smile:

(For context, Pinta is a fork of Paint.NET from about 15 years ago whilst it was still under open licensing, rewritten with a GTK UI, Paint.NET being “more than MS Paint but less than GIMP”)

2

Hi,

Thanks for the additional context in this request! This all makes sense to me, so I’ve gone ahead and created the gtk3 track for pinta.

Thanks,

Odysseus

1 Like
3

Thanks Odysseus :slight_smile: - the GTK4 release should be “soon”, I think the only thing actually stopping the release is issues with the GTK4 bindings for Windows currently causing memory corruption between the managed and unmanaged code so there’s a lot of investigation there and as soon as it’s done this track will actually get used.