Debian 14 plans to ax Gtk2 – and hard pruning stimulates fresh growth
An effort to revive and reinvigorate the 2002 Gtk2 GUI programming toolkit is growing and gaining interest… as we predicted would happen a few months ago.
The gtk2-ng project is reviving and modernizing Gtk2 version 2, which the GNOME developers declared dead back in 2020. We held off on reporting this for a while to see if the idea would gain some support, and it does seem to winning interest and followers.
Reviving a 24-year-old toolkit that reached its official end-of-life six years ago is a retrospective sort of undertaking, and as such, it appeals to some modern-but-nostalgic development projects. Development is hosted on the Git instance of the Devuan project, the systemd-free fork of Debian. (Last year, Devuan announced its support of Xlibre, the X.org fork that aims to re-invigorate X11 development.) However, developer Daemonratte announced the fork in a thread on the forums of the Pale Moon browser: GTK2 revival. Pale Moon, as we described in 2021, is a continuing fork of an early version of Firefox.
REG AD
Back in February, when we covered the news that Debian 14 planned to drop Gtk2, we mentioned that this might provide the impetus for a fork.
REG AD
This isn’t the first such fork, and we mentioned then that the Ardour digital audio workstation we last looked at in 2022 maintains its own internal version called YTK. Daemonratte says that they’ve already incorporated some fixes from that, and also from an earlier fork by stefan11111 which has been inactive for a couple of years. They then outline the current goals:
Current status:
Making it Y2K38-safe
Getting rid of all deprecation warnings
Patching it for NetBSD and backporting NetBSD-specific patches
Testing it on all kinds of hardware
Further modernization without breaking ABI
Future plans:
Implement touch support and smooth scrolling from Ardour’s ytk without breaking ABI, so Ardour can be compiled against gtk2 again
Heavily lobby for its adoption in the BSD and systemdfree Linux world
Reimplement GtkMozEmbed for UXP, so this wonderful engine can be used in gtk2 projects
Gtk originally stood for GIMP Tool Kit: 30 years ago, when the GIMP image editor made its public début, Gtk was the set of tools GIMP’s authors created to make it easier to write GUI apps in C. Six years later, GTK+ 2.0.0 appeared. The new plus symbol in its name represented a new object-oriented design.
When Miguel de Icaza announced the GNOME desktop project in 1997, it adopted Gtk instead of the then-semi-commercial Qt that KDE used. Since then, Gtk has been developed along with GNOME. GIMP development is relatively slow: the team finally released version 3.0 a year ago, and it uses Gtk 3. (Last month, it released version 3.2.4.) Since launch, though, the GNOME project has released 39 numbered versions, and in recent decades Gtk has kept pace with GNOME, not GIMP.
The last version of Gtk 2 was GTK+ 2.24.0 in 2012. The GNOME developers officially said it was end-of-life with the release of Gtk 4 in 2020.
REG AD
Gtk2-ng is far from the only project to fork and revive an older version of a project which has since been superseded by newer versions from the original team. One of the obvious ones is the MATE desktop, which Argentinian developer Perberos announced in 2011. Saying that, though, Daemonratte stated:
"The ultimate vision of this fork is to keep gtk2 alive for software using it right now and to revive gtk2 versions of […] Gnome2 […]. Yes, I don’t have to do this alone and no, Mate is not an option, because they use gtk3 now."
It is very much not alone. We have been covering releases of KDE 3 fork the Trinity desktop environment since version 14.0.11 in 2021. This vulture used KDE 1.x back when it was the state of the Linux art, and for us, KDE 3.x was already too big and complicated.
For the KDE project’s 20th anniversary in 2016, Brazilian developer Helio Chissini de Castro modernized KDE 1 so that it would build and run on Fedora 25. We didn’t realize this had become an ongoing effort, but it has. From later in the Gtk-ng thread, we learned about MiDesktop, a continuing project based on Osiris, a modernized Qt 2. ®