- I covered this on the Reg:
https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/26/debian_14_will_drop_g...
There's an active fork of Gtk2 used in Ardour.
There's also an active fork of Gtk1 used in CinePaint:
https://gitlab.com/robinrowe/gtk1
He's been maintaining this for a long time, too:
https://gtk1-win.sourceforge.net/
The developer appeared on El Reg recently:
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/26/trapc_claude_c_memory...
- If you plough through the first pages so far as I can tell it seems like actually it won't be removed.
Certainly not FPC, because the hard dependency on GTK2 was a misunderstanding.
For Lazarus it seems like dependency on GTK2 is considered a bug and not a fundamental incompatibility, because there are too many GTK2 applications to completely remove it from Debian.
- That's the curse on the Unix world. At least FreeBSD, NetBSD (OpenBSD not by design, but that's understandable because of security) have their compat libraries on plus some of them (even GTK1) in their ports. On 9front, I just adapted Russ Cox' Xword (some crossword player for XWord files, it has a converter from Across Lite Puz files to Xword) for modern times, barely a few lines changes in some drawing function for software made for Plan9 4ed or close.
PD: Guix can do the same as fbsd and nbsd because, well, setting up an isolated environment with time-bound tools it's basically what Guix was born for, reproducibility. Scientific repo for a paper must be run point to point as we had a Slackware setup with Slackbuilds in 2007? That's the point of Guix. You would say... docker. But docker it's overkill.
by potus_kushner
2 subcomments
- maybe the best and simplest solution would be to not remove gtk2 from debian. the last release is stable and there's no technical reason to remove it (as it still works and compiles just fine), only political ones.
- Bigger issue here is they're removing everything that depends on gtk2.
by random29ah
1 subcomments
- Meanwhile, slackware-current has the good old gtk1 and I believe it's only for xmms.
by jamesgeck0
1 subcomments
- Is this the sort of thing that Flatpak would be useful for? Or are there sandbox-related complications when using it to package a compiler?
- The site seem slashdotted by us.
by fuzztester
0 subcomment
- looks like slashdot effect is ongoing for the site.
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