GNOME policy pushed into GTK3 and newer

Posted Jan 25, 2026 22:38 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: GNOME policy pushed into GTK3 and newer by N0NB
Parent article: Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky

> Some years back I took over maintenance of a favorite niche application (amateur radio). It is a C program written against GTK2. Its UI is relatively simple, mainly one screen with a handful of popup windows. I naively set about porting it to GTK3 and learned a number of things.

I'm in a similar boat; I've effectively inherited a GIMP 2.x plugin that relies on a pile of custom GTK2 widgets.

Unfortunately it can't be built against GIMP 3.x without first rewriting its entire UI library to use GTK3, which is far more work than I can justify. And that's _before_ the other GIMP2->GIMP3 porting can meaningfully begin.

> If the intention was for GTK3 and newer to only be used to write GNOME applications, then fine, but it seems as though GTK3/4 are still being presented as general purpose UI toolkits. I'm just asking for honesty regarding the policy layer.

GNOME has pushed more and more GNOME-specific stuff (ie widgets implementing specific policies and the GNOME vision) into separate libraries. Which get them even more hate mail.

> In an ideal world GTK3 would be forked and restored to being a general purpose toolkit

At the end of the day, GTK (like most F/OSS) is a do-ocracy, so it's no surprise that the work that GNOME puts into it reflects GNOME's priorities. (FWIW, I remember similar complaints were made about GTK 2.0 versus GTK 1.2)

...Ironically, each major release of GTK is more agnostic wrt the underlying platform (not just GNOME but also the OS itself) than its predecessor. It's perfectly possible to recreate a GNOME2-era UI with GTK3/4, but someone has to do that work... and that someone does not exist in this very-non-ideal world.