Platform Development • Re: Future of GTK2 and Pale Moon

Yeah, that might be your best option for now. Debian's ELTS offering is apparently nothing to sneeze at, and I just checked... that will go to 2035, but you do have to pay.

Two years ago, as Debian 10’s LTS was about to lapse, I wrote to Freexian explaining my situation and enquiring about costs for personal use. A sales representative contacted me to tell me that Freexian would waive all charge for me personally. For their understanding and kindness (it would have been about €600 a year), I am most grateful.

Ubuntu LTS would very much interest me if not for my attitudes towards Canonical and my impression that it would require a good deal of purging to remove any trace of the Snap Store, Flathub etc from my system if I were to use it. This is, of course, personal, and should not alter your general advice. I should keep Red Hat in mind as a future possibility also, but my impression is that developers give it less attention than Debian and its kin.

You would be in a better position as a developer to confirm or deny my speculations, but I would guess that Linux’s own pressure to use newer versions of distributions is partly also because of Linux’s small usage share, which is further fractured among so many distributions. Preparing three Debian editions in parallel is work enough, but adding an Arch version, Fedora etc etc adds more work than any small-scale developer can reasonably be expected to bear. Supporting more new distributions surely appeals more to developers than many older versions of the same one, and so the older versions are sacrificed.

Comparing Linux’s lot witrh Mac’s would be instructive, not only because both are Unixlike, but because Mac’s usage share twenty years ago resembled Linux’s now, and I am old enough to remember everything said about software not supporting Mac. Since individual Mac OS versions are officially supported only a few years, yet the official Pale Moon build for Linux supports Lion and up, I am left to think that Mac has been more conservative across versions than Linux is. If the latest Pale Moon update requiring FreeBSD 14 is any indication, FreeBSD is more like Linux in this respect. I would have no way to gauge how volatile the other BSD are.