There isnât any speculation to be made. Gtk4 will be released eventually and apps will port to it but most likely it wonât bring any drastic design changes.
And there certainly wonât be a GNOME 4 or coincide with the gtk4 release in any way. GTK and glib are their own independent projects, used by many more desktops than just GNOME.
One motivation for the proposed versioning scheme change is precisely to separate the API of the underlying platform from UX changes.
There are â to the best of my knowledge â no plans for a big architectural change to the desktop like when gnome-shell replaced metacity and gnome-panel in GNOME 3.
That doesnât mean that the UX isnât going to evolve of course, but it really doesnât make much sense to version it like API. Anything that would be released as âGNOME 4â would be much closer in terms of UX and technology to 3.36/3.38 than 3.36 is to â say â 3.10 (no wayland, no headerbars, significantly different desktop shell).
Ive been reading that version scheme change discussion and its very interesting.
(I wasnt expecting/requesting any changes that wouldnt normally be done in a normal release. having followed development recently it has seemed like the old reliance on GTK major number has ended in atleast some places.)
Maybe the term gnome 4 is more loaded than I expected.