Loading animation in MediaDisplay fails after fading in or out

[CodedOre]

Additionally to a progress bar MediaDisplay also uses the loading animation created for MediaPreview:

To allow the animation to be hidden or shown (as the animation is part of MediaDisplay, not MediaDisplayItem), I've added additional css animations to fade an element in or out.
But having two animations on the same element seems not to be possible in GTK (the loading animation simply is still), so we need to look how we do this instead.

[CodedOre]

Since Adw.Animation was merged into main today, this might be something to consider.

Question then is though if we need or want a separate widget implementing the loading animation.

[IBBoard]

I know we've not got a deadline yet, and it's great that libadwaita is progressing… but how much will it restrict our supported distros? What's the lag like between commits to main and releases, and then releases to distros?

[CodedOre]

I am using libadwaita (since I'm targeting GTK4), which is currently still in alpha. If I am right the first stable release will be together with Gnome 42 (next march).

So, native support will likely be from Fedora 36, Ubuntu 22.04 and similar.

I know you not really liking this, but basing it on GTK4 and libadwaita makes sense because of the new features (native dark style preference, Gtk.Picture and Gtk.MediaFile for easy media support) and will also make it more future-proof.

[IBBoard]

We've got to make a transition at some point. And a big break and redesign for the move to GTK4 makes more sense than partial coverage of features and distros by using an older (but still not widespread) libhandy. I'm just thinking of user numbers and how many people we lock out (who'll potentially complain).

I'm on openSUSE Tumbleweed, which is a rolling distro, and so I'm fine for up-to-date libraries 😁