Platform Development • Re: Future of GTK2 and Pale Moon

I looked up the GTK2 drop timelines for the various major distros last night - Fedora has already killed it, Arch is killing it right now as fast as it can and has moved their GTK2 packages out of the main repos and into the AUR, Debian will not ship it in about 16 months with Debian 14, and is likely to cut it from Debian Testing before that, and Ubuntu will not ship it with 28.04 in 2028, and will probably have to drop GTK2 before then if Debian Testing drops it sooner.

The good news is that unless your users are on Fedora (which should be very few users) or Debian then they could potentially use GTK2 support from the Arch AUR or Ubuntu LTS for a few years. And those Ubuntu LTS's do have extended long-term support for up to 15 years of security updates to core packages with a free Ubuntu Pro account. If people want to keep using GTK2 versions of Pale Moon with NPAPI support, a good idea would be to do what I do and keep a VM of a workable version of Ubuntu LTS and sign up for the free Ubuntu Pro extended LTS subscription, and ride that out for a good long while. I think my Ubuntu 18.04 LTS vm is still good to use until about 2032, and a new Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vm today would be supported by Canonical until around 2040. So there's some relatively easy options for people who still want to be using their flash player plugin 5 years from now.

Not quite as dire as I was thinking.