Platform Development • Re: Future of GTK2 and Pale Moon

It means a lot to know that you are working on preparing in advance for GTK2’s depreciation by most Linux distributions. I appreciate the early warning. Since i know some users here like MX and Antix, I would be curious to whether those distros intend to uphold it. Some casual searching also suggests to me that the problem might not be as severe as expected: Firefox 64 supported Flash using GTK3. Naïvely, and you could correct me if your expertise makes it obvious I am making a basic error here, this suggests that support can be preserved. Has anybody tested NPAPI in Pale Moon on current Fedora and an otherwise compatible system to tell us whether it fails?

Debian will not ship [GTK2] in about 16 months with Debian 14…

If Ubuntu’s LTS are to be counted, one should also note that Debian 13 is expected to enjoy such support until 2035. In any case, I should take this as an early warning. I have been prepared for the possibility of Flash failing in Linux sometime in or after 2029 for me. If this were to happen, I should simply move my Flash browsing into my XP virtual machine which uses Roy Tam’s builds, as I have exhibited a few times before. I could also consider options like running the Windows version of Pale Moon in Wine.

I kind of wanted people who like GTK2 to understand that if they want it and think they are adult enough to make their own choices, they have to be tech-savvy enough to build Epyrus themselves, and either pick out a distro that has it, find an RPM packaged by someone else for their preferred distro, or maybe even one day build GTK2 themselves. Basically sort of a nudge towards "If you are on Linux and you want someone to hold your hand, you need to use something better supported. If you want it your way, you will have to build yourself and prove you understand exactly what you're choosing and how to sustain it."

I kindly caution against this approach, simply because I fall in the unhappy, neutral ground between the two classes you discuss. Because I know you are also autistic, I can speak forthrightly: The kind of involved, often unpredictable technical work which building software (or much troubleshooting) involves is the kind which tends to provoke panic attacks in me. Although I do not imagine I would be personally affected by your decision here, it is easy for me to conceive of somebody else like me in this respect. In our case, being a responsible adult means recognising we need to protect our emotional health against hazards like those uncoöperative IT can provoke.

In any case, I believe that outright depreciating NPAPI for Linux, even if it is due to underlying GTK2 changes beyond your scope, would be unwise because of the inevitable backlash. It would be far too easy for someone naïve or malicious (and you know there are many of these out there) to portray Pale Moon as reneging on its promise to preserve NPAPI support, even if this is no more in your hands than Flash’s incompatibility with younger Glibc versions if run with Nvidia hardware. Better in the worst case, I think, to keep nominal NPAPI support with the proviso for the user that most distros have torn the ground out from under his feet.