OSes

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 .…