Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 14, 2026 23:36 UTC (Wed) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
In reply to: Maybe a hint? by wtarreau
Parent article: Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky

> But if gtk3 was released in 2011 and Gimp itself, where all of this originated from, only adopted it 14 years later,

There was a branch of GIMP using GTK 3 API before GTK 3.0 was released. The GIMP team prioritised moving the internals of the application to a whole new engine, and getting it right, before focusing on the UI side of things. They also had their lives complicated by the fact that GIMP has a ton of Python plugins, which required porting from Python 2 to Python 3, and from static GTK bindings to dynamic ones built on introspection.

> So actually the problem might be the newer versions themselves if programs don't adopt them for that long.

Or that there are a lot of GTK-based applications that are write-once, and their maintenance is on a best effort basis; once they are written, nothing else except small bug fixing is of import, and those applications are supposed to run on systems that are equivalent to the ones on which they were developed. In 2011, those systems were: Linux, X11, non-HIDPI.

The fact that somebody is using a GTK2 application does not imply that the application is still being actively maintained, either; but, from a Debian perspective, they are exactly the same.