GTK2 being on life support in 2026 is kind of wild when you remember GTK3 has been around for ~15 years and 3.24 has been “the stable one” for more than half a decade. Debian’s mail here also makes it clear this isn’t a sudden rug pull: they started filing bugs against affected packages in 2020 and the list is already down to <25% of what it was.
The hard part is always the long tail and the installer. If the graphical Debian Installer still depends on GTK2, that’s a good reminder of how much distro plumbing quietly sits on old tech because “it works” and no one wants to touch it. My guess is we’ll see more distros take this approach: aggressively prune old toolkits from the main repos, and push truly unmaintained apps into containers/Flatpaks or community overlays instead of carrying a full compatibility stack forever.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 6.7 ms ] threadThe hard part is always the long tail and the installer. If the graphical Debian Installer still depends on GTK2, that’s a good reminder of how much distro plumbing quietly sits on old tech because “it works” and no one wants to touch it. My guess is we’ll see more distros take this approach: aggressively prune old toolkits from the main repos, and push truly unmaintained apps into containers/Flatpaks or community overlays instead of carrying a full compatibility stack forever.