So like Linux

Posted Jan 18, 2026 6:19 UTC (Sun) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
Parent article: Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky

I feel this highlights a key difference between Linux and other environments and especially the attitude towards ABI stability.

On the one hand, it is very reasonable to remove GTK2. It is ancient and other packages distributed as part of Debian are not using it.

But are we really saying that the only software that matters is the software distributed as part of the OS? The idea that the operating system and the software that runs on it is a single collection of curated software is very much a Linux innovation. I do not remember other operating systems with package managers and this kind of coupling.

On Windows, we would expect to have little knowledge of the software that exists out in the wild. If Windows cannot run Windows software, the operating system gets blamed. And so ABI stability and backwards compatibility are a big thing on Windows.

In concept, Open Source software lives forever. And as long as there are users and developers interested in the software, it continues to evolve. As such, it is not such a big deal to adapt it to things like UI frameworks as things change. It is hopefully a small amount of the work (though perhaps GIMP would disagree).

And commercial software for sale could work similarly. But a lot of proprietary software, perhaps most of it, does not work like that. Software written by businesses for their own use is often created in a dedicated project. Once the software is "complete", the team may disband. The software may never see significant updates. If the software does not need new features, there may be nobody (and no budget) to do a UI rewrite 5 years later. If the GUI libraries disappear, the program will break.

On Windows, the operating system only ships with the basic layers of UI support. A Windows application using MFC libraries will likely ship those DLLs itself. This means that all Windows has to do to keep hosting this application for decades is to keep Win32 stable. On Linux, we expect the distro to provide almost every dependency we need. And then we expect the distro to continue supporting these over long periods.

A solution to this problem could easily be OCI containers. Debian 14 may not include GTK2, but Debian 13 still does. And since containers only rely on the much more stable Linux kernel ABI, I predict that a Debian 13 container will still run just fine on Debian 16 and probably Debian 20.

And some distros offer extremely long support periods. RHEL offers 10 years of support. Ubuntu now offers 15! If you pick an Ubuntu LTS as the base for your enterprise container, you can get this length of support on any distro. And the container will continue to work even after this support ends.

So not every distro needs to maintain everything forever. One of the nice things about Linux I think is that we can eventually leave some of the cruft behind.

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So like Linux

Posted Jan 19, 2026 14:39 UTC (Mon) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

> It is ancient and other packages distributed as part of Debian are not using it.

150 packages in Debian are using it, and will be forcibly removed as well.

> On Windows, the operating system only ships with the basic layers of UI support. A Windows application using MFC libraries will likely ship those DLLs itself. This means that all Windows has to do to keep hosting this application for decades is to keep Win32 stable. On Linux, we expect the distro to provide almost every dependency we need. And then we expect the distro to continue supporting these over long periods.

I think windows, by analogy, is useful -- I've considered gtk2 to be analaguous to win32 -- but your comparison here is more subtle: perhaps xlib would be the win32 comparator and gtk2 to one of the MFC libraries. I am not familiar enough with Windows to know what their support story has been for MFC.

> A solution to this problem could easily be OCI containers.

Or some other container-like solution such as Flatpaks,

> And some distros offer extremely long support periods. RHEL offers 10 years of support. Ubuntu now offers 15! If you pick an Ubuntu LTS as the base for your enterprise container, you can get this length of support on any distro. And the container will continue to work even after this support ends.

Ultimately *someone* has to do the supporting. But we could perhaps consolidate and have fewer distributions repeating the same work. The work involved maintaining gtk2 into the future is hard to predict, but someone else did an analysis of security issues (just one of the maintenance issues of course) and it was relatively low. (Contrast with QT4 where part of the problem is the API is much larger and IIRC embeds a browser).

I think this raises really interesting questions about what a distribution should be providing nowadays. I personally think we are still far too package-centric. 25 years ago, repackaging and distributing software was a much more valuable job than it is today, where (with e.g. the js ecosystem) it's akin to boiling the ocean. I feel the value proposition of distros is elsewhere: in particular, in their values and their communities.