22 points | by validatori 2 days ago ago
4 comments
This is interesting to see and shows the beauty of open source: if you want GTK2 to be alive, you can put in the effort to revive it.
This being Devuan it is driven by those pesky Debian devs removing GTK2
> Debian is not the only distro doing this. A few months ago, Arch Linux
> removed GTK 2 from its official (non-AUR) repositories [1]. RHEL 10 was
> released earlier in 2025 without GTK 2.
>
> gtk3 was released 15 years ago. Debian has had the stable 3.24 series
> for more than 7 years.
The announcement[0] has a quite long list of packages still using it.
0. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/01/msg00090.html
Are they just “against” or is there a currently required set of applications which cannot migrate to Gtk3 or Gtk4?
Even Gimp is using Gtk3. And already heading to Gtk4. Take that already with a smile ;)
GTK3 is a mixed set of tradeoffs. GTK4 is a strict downgrade.
If proper fractional scaling could be backported to GTK2 it would be strictly better than GTK3. Having GTKRC theming again would be amazing.
Probably both. GTK2 is a very different toolkit to GTK3 and 4, so naturally some things that work with it will never be possible with GTK3 or 4
This is interesting to see and shows the beauty of open source: if you want GTK2 to be alive, you can put in the effort to revive it.
This being Devuan it is driven by those pesky Debian devs removing GTK2
> Debian is not the only distro doing this. A few months ago, Arch Linux
> removed GTK 2 from its official (non-AUR) repositories [1]. RHEL 10 was
> released earlier in 2025 without GTK 2.
>
> gtk3 was released 15 years ago. Debian has had the stable 3.24 series
> for more than 7 years.
The announcement[0] has a quite long list of packages still using it.
0. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/01/msg00090.html
Are they just “against” or is there a currently required set of applications which cannot migrate to Gtk3 or Gtk4?
Even Gimp is using Gtk3. And already heading to Gtk4. Take that already with a smile ;)
GTK3 is a mixed set of tradeoffs. GTK4 is a strict downgrade.
If proper fractional scaling could be backported to GTK2 it would be strictly better than GTK3. Having GTKRC theming again would be amazing.
Probably both. GTK2 is a very different toolkit to GTK3 and 4, so naturally some things that work with it will never be possible with GTK3 or 4