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Author: William Yu

Linux Joins the Dark Side

While we’ve been hard at working getting Linux ARM 64 support ready for Xojo 2022r4, released earlier today, we also updated Xojo’s Linux support for Dark Mode. Color.IsDarkMode now functions properly and our Linux IDE has now officially joined the dark side.

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Goodbye GTK+ 2, Hello GTK+ 3

With the release of Xojo 2017 Release 2 we have updated our Linux Desktop framework to use GTK+ 3 instead of GTK+ 2. For those not familiar with Linux, GTK+ is a User Interface (i.e. UI) toolkit, much like Cocoa is for macOS and Win32 controls (or WinForms.NET or WPF) is for Windows. GTK+ 2 has been supplying the user interface for Xojo Desktop apps for Linux since we first targeted Linux over a decade ago. It has since been deprecated in favor of GTK+ 3 for quite some time now and GTK+ 2 is typically not installed by default on most Linux distros these days, which makes deploying Xojo Desktop apps on Linux more painful. Unfortunately GTK+ 3 is not ABI compatible with GTK+ 2 so we could not migrate to using GTK+ 3 without completely ditching GTK+ 2.

Let’s take a closer look at what this means for your Linux apps:

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Fractional Scale Factors

With all the Retina/HiDPI work done in the past few years, we’ve had to add some new features along with it. One of these newer features is the Graphics ScaleX and ScaleY properties.  For the purposes of Retina/HiDPI, the scale factor is used when converting user space coordinates to backing store coordinates.  While mostly integral on MacOS (unless originating from some code that’s probably not ours), it can vary on Windows, and perhaps arguably mostly fractional.  This is because Windows allows you to set DPI scales at 125%, 150%, etc. So when dealing with fractional scales there are a few things to watch out for:

  1. Rounding issues
  2. Anti-alias effect

While the framework takes care of rounding issues, for the most part, the secondary issue of anti-aliasing is up to you.

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