I noticed that the current GTK port does not show on-screen messages, such as when a ROM file is loaded.
I am not sure if this is a bug, since the build for version 1.63 does show on-screen messages.
If this is not a bug, I have already created a pull request, where I implemented handling of a config file option to let the user choose the timeout length for on-screen text messages. Note this feature already exists in the Windows port.