Using Libadwaita on Linux/Windows apps (original) (raw)

Hi, I would like to know if it’s possible to use Libadwaita for cross-platform applications, I’m developing an application available for Linux and Windows and would like to use it. Can be packed?

Thanks in advance for response!

monster (Jamie Gravendeel) May 30, 2025, 9:20am 2

It will work on Windows, but from experience, I’d say that the stability you can expect is less: GTK developers use Linux, and regressions can therefore come unnoticed.

But I’d say that shouldn’t stop you from using it, it’s definitely possible and there are Libadwaita apps packaged for Windows.

Hi,

I develop gtk apps on both Linux and Windows, I confirm it works relatively well there, though with a few caveats. Libadwaita supports a few cool stuff, like dark/light theme and accent color detection from the system.

The main issues are:

• gtk4 uses a hardware-accelerated renderer, I observe sometimes some stability issues, mostly due to bad GPU drivers. May not work properly on ancient hardware.
• Adwaita windows have gigantic shadows that block clicks on objects behind them. There are ongoing discussions to reduce their size, so I expect improvements on that regard.
• gtk currently doesn’t support some native windows features like snapping/tiling. There is ongoing work to support that, but probably won’t be available in a short future.
• There are sometime freezes during drag-n-drop operations
• The font rendering is suboptimal, there are currently attempts to improve that. Meanwhile, forcing the fontconfig renderer may improve the situation.

Regarding packaging, an easy way coud be to submit the app to msys2, it uses a similar packaging tooling as archlinux, so easy to migrate from Linux.

Standalone installers are possible, but I personally never used them, so can’t tell much about it. Packaging also depends on the app’s programming language.

Thank you to all for your responses!