The Debian team responsible for the GNOME packages plans to discontinue the GTK2 toolkit in Debian 14, which is expected to be released in summer 2027. The GTK project's developers stopped maintaining GTK2 more than five years ago, and maintaining the abandoned GTK2 toolkit in the main repository is becoming problematic. Distributions that have already discontinued GTK2 include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16, openSUSE 16, and Arch Linux. Debian is encouraged to follow suit.
Until recently, GIMP remained the only significant project based on GTK2, but starting with GIMP 3.0, this graphics editor was ported to GTK3. GTK is also used in the popular sound editor Ardour, but this project does not rely on external libraries and supports its own fork of GTK2, YTK.
The most serious issue blocking the removal of GTK2 is that GTK2 continues to be used in Debian's graphical installer. There are also approximately 150 packages remaining in the Debian repository that have dependencies on GTK2. If GTK2 is discontinued, these packages will have to be removed, as they are largely undeveloped and their porting to GTK3 is unlikely.
Many of these packages still have active users who don't intend to switch to other programs. There were also developers who advocated for maintaining GTK2 support in Debian and considered the reason for its removal to be far-fetched. For example, mentioning that GTK3 was released 15 years ago is meaningless, as GTK3 doesn't replace GTK2, just as GTK4 doesn't replace GTK3.
Arguments such as the lack of HiDPI and Wayland support in GTK2 are also questioned, as they are unnecessary and users are happy with it. Comparisons with Arch Linux, where GTK2 is excluded from the main repository but available in unofficial repositories, are considered inappropriate. The discussion also asks how GTK2 is inferior to GCC 3.3, which was shipped for over 20 years, up until Debian 12, 16 of which were spent simply providing libstdc++5 for legacy executables.
Those who support removing GTK2 cite the inability to ensure the package's security as one of the reasons, while opponents counter that GTK2 security in Debian has been of little concern so far, and the last bug marked as a vulnerability dates back to 2015.
Discussions are currently underway on ways to maintain support for GTK2-based applications in the distribution. One option proposed is to move GTK2 and related applications to a separate, unofficial repository. Other ideas include creating a framework that translates the GTK2 API to GTK3 and switching to the Ardour fork of GTK2. It has also been suggested that rather than removing packages outright, they be orphaned in the hopes that someone will be willing to continue maintaining them.
Popular packages based on GTK2 include:
- afterstep
- amsynth
- doublecmd (Double Commander)
- fpc
- geg
- gkrellm
- gmpc
- gnome-paint
- gkrellm
- grpn
- hexchat
- lbus
- lazarus
- mplayer
- navit
- openjdk-8
- pidgin
- rlvm
- sane-frontends
- sawfish
- scim
- seqtools
- sound modem
- sylpheed
- tenacious
- tickr
- tilem
- uim
- usermode
- xlog
- xurnal
- xsane
- xzgv
- z88
Source: opennet.ru
