Other/future projects • Re: GTK2 revival

Hi athenian200, i'm greenjeans, one of the folks helping Daemonratte with the project, I read your post and was very moved by it, enough to want to register here so I could offer a message of hope.

For myself when we started our new forum and began these projects, I had been working solely with gtk3 in my app development, so gtk2 wasn't my first priority and I had lobbied some for forking it instead. But I do love choices, so when Daemonratte asked me to help out I was honored and happy to help in my limited capacity and skill level.

But see gtk2 isn't the only thing our team is thinking of forking/reviving, we have a LOT of things on the table and at some point when this current project has gone stable I want to actively work on doing the same for gtk3. In a perfect world they'd eventually meet in the middle and be a nice universal toolkit, but these ideas and projects are rapidly evolving, so we'll see what happens. But let me assure you as we did for gtk2: GTK3 is not dead yet, we will not let it go gentle into that good night.

So first post and all, sorry I didn't do an introduction, but I also want to say kudos to the whole Palemoon team, I spent a great deal of time yesterday running a slightly older gtk2 version on gtk2-ng, and it was awesome! I used it in fact for the test iso, and plan on replacing chromium with it in my distro project.

Just saw your message. I'm glad you guys aren't upset with me for not being as enthusiastic about the GTK2 revival as everyone else, and seem to get where I'm coming from. Yeah, I really am way more worried about GTK3 deprecation than anything else. Because we already have a strategy to survive GTK2 going away (I seem to recall Arch dropped it years ago and that's about when I implemented the flag to disable NPAPI for self-builders who don't want to fight with GTK2 dependencies), but knowing how these things work, that means GTK3 is next on the chopping block and that means I have to worry about possibly Debian 16 or 17 not having it? It was stressful because it meant we went from having one legacy toolkit and one supported toolkit... to a dead toolkit and a legacy one with no further fallbacks unless we get a new one working ourselves.

My discomfort was actually more based on the way people who like GTK2 tend to act in our community at times, being a little exasperated with that, and that biasing my perception of what you guys are doing. Though I will say, there was actually a guy a long time ago who wanted to do something like what you're talking about... he was called The_Squash, and it seemed like he tried to do a sort of merged GTK2/GTK3 thing, but it wound up being vaporware and not really getting off the ground. There was also a guy named mrnhmath who I think wanted to fork GNOME 2 at one point, though I don't know if that went anywhere (don't think it did). It sounds like you guys are a bit more serious about this, and are possibly creating a whole distro around the idea.