Why do some want to get rid of GTK2 and all applications that depend on it?

Posted Jan 19, 2026 4:37 UTC (Mon) by jcelerier (guest, #181931)
In reply to: Why do some want to get rid of GTK2 and all applications that depend on it? by pizza
Parent article: Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky

> Your projector and laptop screen both claimed to be 96dpi as far as X and all of its applications are concerned. Change that at your own peril; nearly every X11-native application will break because non-font elements will not scale, resulting in text that either overflows or is truncated by its bounding box. (most notably in menu bars, single-line input forms and labels). Ironically the applications that don't horribly break bypass X11 font rendering (along with most other X11 primitives) entirely, relying instead on client-side rendering and just slinging the resultant pixmaps to the X server. (In other words, the same paradigm that Wayland is built around)

I've been using Xft.dpi to adjust DPI since 2014 and it's always worked for me, even for apps that AFAIK end up calling raw X11 drawing primitives (for instance PureData which uses TCL/Tk). Do you have example of broken apps?