GTK doesn't play much of a role in our GUI. When you're looking at most of the main tabs in Ardour (editor, mixer, recorder window, cue page) almost everything you're looking at is either our own Canvas or custom widgets. Still we do sit on top of GTK+ 2's basic infrastructure and still rely on it for the "big widgets" (file browser, tree/listviews, menus, color dialogs, text entry).

> custom widgets

Implemented like any custom GTK+ 2 widget?

Some are, some have a layer between them called CairoWidget so that they can just draw directly in Cairo. We also tend to use Gtkmm to derive, so that we don't have to do a lot of C boiler-plate code (and you won't find a "full widget implementation" anywhere, because of this).

Good to know, thanks!

How are you approaching a Wayland port?

We keep meaning to provide a page equivalent to this one. Our position is more or less identical:

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...

We have user reports that XWayland causes error when running many plugins (primarily those written use JUCE); we also have reports that using XNest tends to be more successful.

It would have to be done someday. We are slowly running out of desktop environments that haven't abandoned X11.