Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 15, 2026 9:37 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: Maybe a hint? by fraetor
Parent article: Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky

> At least at my place of work, GTK2 is used for a lot of internal applications that nowadays would be written with web interfaces. Many of these applications are "finished", so there is little appetite to spend effort upgrading toolkits.

Honestly, these kinds of projects are better served by just creating a Dockerfile that builds the project in the last Debian release where it worked and just shipping that. Then you have compatibility until the kernel interfaces change which is a lot longer. For internal applications security updates can only break things.

In theory, people could migrate all those old applications to something like Flatpak distribution, then the problem goes away.

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Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 15, 2026 16:05 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

That only works until your wayland compositor remains X11 compatible, which is probably much shorter.

Also the kernel breaking compatibility does happen.

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 15, 2026 17:32 UTC (Thu) by Tarnyko (subscriber, #90061) [Link]

Fair statement, but I doubt Xwayland is leaving anytime soon.

As was already said, such an app would benefit from a proper .AppImage version; it should work everywhere if done correctly.