So like Linux

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.