I built GTK+ 2.8.3 from sources yesterday, and am now looking at a Gnome desktop of considerable visual elegance and charm. Trouble is, up until yesterday I was using KDE exclusively, so I have no idea whether the GTK+ upgrade is at all responsible for the graphical quality I now see in front of me. Either way, the font rendering in particular is just lovely. It’s almost as nice to look at as OS X running on my dad’s Mac.

The reason for building the latest-and-greatest GTK+ wasn’t in any case to make Gnome look pretty, but so I could check out Paolo Martini’s addition of Cairo support to Gtk2Hs.. Cairo is the 2D vector graphics library that will soon be drawing everything you see on your Gnome desktop, potentially via an OpenGL back-end. It’s a technology I was excited about, but skeptical of ever seeing in action, two or three years ago - now it’s nearly cooked, and the Linux desktop is about to take another big step forwards.