Other/future projects • Re: GTK2 revival

That's all well and good, but we're on Gnome version 50 now, and anything on GTK3 is already ancient history if you are talking in terms of future-proofing your project. As i said, the disconnect between Gnome development and actual home desktop use is widening so much that at some point something is likely to break badly. Anyway, Qt looks good from that perspective, but I'm not the one that's going to do all the hard work, only you can decide what's worthwhile for you to do.

Yeah, that sounds like we pretty much agree, we're just coming at this from different angles.

But yeah, I am definitely well aware (painfully aware and more so than I've wanted to let on for years) that MATE and Cinnamon are buying us time on Linux already... if it weren't for those, distros might have dropped GTK3 already by now and we would have been left with no way to run on modern Linux period.

I like reading your posts, but I think you worry about these things about a decade too soon. Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE have no stated goals or road-maps for a gtk4 transition. They have enough trouble with Wayland. IMO the really important thing concerning Pale Moon is web compatibility. Everything else pales in comparison.

Ubuntu 26.04 is out with a fully intact gtk2 stack. Ubuntu 26.04 is supported 10 years for free (maybe even 15 years). So Ubuntu users will have gtk2 intact at least until 2036. What that means is that 16 years after being declared dead by Gnome, gtk2 will still be supported by Ubuntu. Ubuntu is by far the largest distro by user base - Ubuntu and official flavors, Linux Mint and Zorin OS. Fedora is very small compared to that. Arch will likely always have gtk2 in AUR. The only question mark is Debian which is still discussing the fate of gtk2 in official Debian 14 repos (which will be released summer/autumn 2027).

So in essence gtk2 will be supported until 2036 (the only possible big exception being official Debian repos). Gtk3 isn't declared dead yet. Gtk5 is expected in the 2028 - 2030 time frame. Add 16 years to 2028 and gtk3 will enjoy major distro support until 2044. Gtk3 is a great toolkit because it is mature. I don't think there will ever be better toolkit-integration for Pale Moon on Linux desktops. If Pale Moon is still developed in 2044 I think you have won either way and possibly the toolkit problem has solved itself. It is possible that both gtk and Qt are dead-ends as universal Linux/nix toolkits.