Other/future projects • Re: GTK2 revival

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.

I tend to agree, in fact that's why this hasn't come up until recently. Debian talking about dropping GTK2 created quite a stir and got everyone in the Linux community started worrying if GTK3 is next or not, with the nearby GNOME 50 release timing (the one that finally drops the XOrg session) not helping matters. Add to that this thread existing and people talking about GTK2 all over again, and now it's on my mind because it was brought to the foreground. LOL.

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.

Yes, I would actually say GTK3 has a better chance of surviving as something of a "near-permanent toolkit" than GTK2 does. Most applications have already bitten the bullet and done a GTK3 migration or gone Qt if they couldn't stand it. MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE, and even GNOME's own GNOME Flashback all rely on GTK3 currently, putting aside a small but vocal contingent of actual GNOME 3 fans who still prefer it over modern GNOME. That's 5 desktops using it as their main toolkit. There was maybe GNOME 2 and MATE briefly using GTK2. Also, GTK3 supports Wayland (which doesn't help us, but does help GTK3 as a platform). GTK2 was X11 only pretty much. That's another point in favor of GTK3. It supports X11 and Wayland reasonably well, while GTK2 is X11 only, and GTK4 is significantly better at supporting Wayland than X11. So the ecosystem being in flux between X11 and Wayland, and needing something that supports both reasonably well the thing that could keep it alive longer than GTK2, if distros care enough and are sensible. Distros might decide to give users some mercy on the GTK3 front given how slow adoption of GTK3 was to begin with and how hard they had to fight to get people off GTK2, and how chaotic the Wayland transition has been (and frankly I hope they do).

Just bear in mind that I think like a long term planner (in case it wasn't already obvious). Like, in MBTI terms my dominant psychological function is Ni (introverted intuition)... if you look that one up, it will explain everything as to why my brain works like this, but for this context, all you have to know is it means my natural tendency is to look at long-term ripple effects, patterns, and anxiously try to make future plans based on them rather than live in the past or the present. It's probably why GTK2 sticks in my craw so much... for a person who thinks the way I do and tries to prepare for worst-case scenarios and deprecation hits before they happen, discussion of GTK2 feels like "noise in the signal" from people who don't see the bigger picture and think primarily of their own comfort, it doesn't give me useful information about the future or help me adapt to a chaotic world. Which is probably why I wound up overreacting to this thread. My mind was screaming at me from the moment it was posted to push in the opposite direction and seeing this as danger, which makes a lot of sense once you know how my mind works.

No, gtk2 already does not get security or any other updates, and by 2036 Ubuntu 26.04 will only be getting critical security updates to things like the kernel. Also, you are missing @athenian200's main point - he doesn't want to be the guy working on the browser whose users have to run 5 or 10 year old versions of Ubuntu to run it. And if your developers don't want to develop it then you can either fork it or not have it at all.

Yeah, you basically get it. It's like... on Linux, I'm sure people who run LTS distros or know how to self-compile stuff can run much, much older stuff than anyone expects. But like... to put this in context. There are niche CDE revival projects out there, and a lot of people who really want that find ways to get it working. But few or no distros actually ship this. Same with TDE and MiDesktop's forks of older Qt they use for a retro KDE environment.

So from my perspective, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to target a niche like CDE revival forks, or an older KDE fork like TDE, and say you "support Linux" just because someone who tries hard enough could get your application working on Linux under some circumstances. And I guess I just don't really see why a fork of GTK2, or even a whole fork of GNOME 2, would move the needle much. TDE is cool, CDE revival forks are cool... don't get me wrong, but you don't exactly see application developers with cross-platform applications still in development targeting them and then saying that's how they want to support Linux as a whole.

My skepticism isn't that they haven't put in the work or what they're making isn't usable... it's more that it's going to be very niche and won't see mainstream adoption like MATE or Cinnamon did, because those projects took a very careful middle ground and supported a GTK3 platform just new enough that they seemed to have a future and could spin it out for a long time. I guess I really should have just been blunter from the start and said... I think this GTK2 revival will end up like the GNOME equivalent of TDE or MiDesktop, which are retro KDE forks based on hard forks of older Qt. Sure, they work. Sure they have their fans. Yeah, they're fun to play around with and take screenshots of. Maybe if you're a power user, you can even make it work as your environment for a time. But no, they didn't move the needle as far as what most Linux distros ship and what toolkits people expect applications to target. I feel like that's almost rude to say given how hard I'm sure they worked (and believe me, I respect the work), but it's hard to see how that wouldn't be the case.