This is interesting to see and shows the beauty of open source: if you want GTK2 to be alive, you can put in the effort to revive it.

This being Devuan it is driven by those pesky Debian devs removing GTK2

> Debian is not the only distro doing this. A few months ago, Arch Linux

> removed GTK 2 from its official (non-AUR) repositories [1]. RHEL 10 was

> released earlier in 2025 without GTK 2.

>

> gtk3 was released 15 years ago. Debian has had the stable 3.24 series

> for more than 7 years.

The announcement[0] has a quite long list of packages still using it.

0. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/01/msg00090.html

Are they just “against” or is there a currently required set of applications which cannot migrate to Gtk3 or Gtk4?

Even Gimp is using Gtk3. And already heading to Gtk4. Take that already with a smile ;)

GTK3 is a mixed set of tradeoffs. GTK4 is a strict downgrade.

If proper fractional scaling could be backported to GTK2 it would be strictly better than GTK3. Having GTKRC theming again would be amazing.

Probably both. GTK2 is a very different toolkit to GTK3 and 4, so naturally some things that work with it will never be possible with GTK3 or 4