Will it be GTK2+ / Gnome?

[Slapo]

I asked Tor Lillqvist about this emulation thingy, here's what he said (used with permission):

"Who would be emulating what? Especially now with cairo, most of the low-level code has been designed cross-platform from the start.

Initially indeed much work in the GTK+ porting effort was caused by the need to "emulate" low-level X11 behaviour, as GDK at first was mostly a thin layer on top of Xlib.

A GTK+ application that behaves pathologically might be much slower on Windows than on X11, because some of the GDK API is trivially implemented on top of X11, but requires lots of work on top of GDI.

GTK+ isn't any more "emulated" than the "native" widgets (the Microsoft "Common Controls", I think they are called) are. Both are built on top of the Win32 GDI.

As to wxWidgets, it uses GTK+ on X11 (Unix), but not on Windows. On Windows it presumably uses the Common Controls.

Well, there certainly are bugs and misfeatures in GTK+ on Windows, for instance related to the concepts of transient windows, window groups etc. This can be irritating indeed in applications that use lots of top-level windows, like GIMP (and presumably Inkscape, I haven't used that). I wouldn't say that "treated like an application" is correct, though. These problems will be fixed eventually.

--tml"

Pretty much says it all, doesn't it

[tml]

I am running Pentium II 400, on Windows, which runs GTK+ app in emulated mode in Windows.

Sorry, what do you mean with that? The lower levels of GTK+ on Win32, to a minor extent, can be said to "emulate" some X11 semantics, but I don't know what you mean with "runs in emulated mode"?

That said, a PII 400 is certainly not the kind of machine one can expect snappy GTK+ application behaviour on, if the application is much complex at all, or does things in a way which is painful to handle on Win32. On the other hand, my previous machine was a PIII 450, and GIMP was quite usable on it.