While the GIMP image editor received a bad rap for the amount of time it took to see a stable release based on the GTK3 toolkit rather than GTK2, only today patches have emerged for taking the Linux kernel's gconfig graphical kernel configuration utility from GTK2 to GTK3.

Linux developer Masahiro Yamada posted a set of 66 patches today for enhancing the xconfig and gconfig kernel configuration (Kconfig) utilities within the Linux kernel source tree. Most notable with these patches is finally migrating the gconfig utility from GTK 2 to GTK 3.

[1]

This GTK interface for configuring the Linux kernel's Kconfig configuration of enabled modules and other kernel tunables has long been stuck in a GTK2 world. But with there being the Qt interface (Linux's [2]xconfig was ported from Qt5 to Qt6 in 2023 ) and other text-based configuration options for configuring the Linux kernel, bringing gconfig to a newer GTK version hasn't been a priority.

In any event for those using make gconfig for configuring your Linux kernel source builds, [3]this patch series migrates gconfig to the GTK 3 toolkit as now one less piece of open-source software still depending upon the outdated toolkit version. Hopefully the patch series will be sent in for the next (Linux v6.17) kernel cycle.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=linux_make_gconfig_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.6-Kconfig-Updates

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250624150645.1107002-1-masahiroy@kernel.org/