Debian 14 will drop Gtk2 – unless Ardour rides to the rescue
- Reference: 1772104273
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/02/26/debian_14_will_drop_gtk2/
- Source link:
Debian 14, codenamed "Forky," is in development and will very probably be released in about 18 months. As with any new release, the developers are removing various old and unsupported packages, including [1]Gtk2 . It's already [2]gone from RHEL , SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE 16, Arch, and others.
Up to a point, this is reasonable. Version 2.0 of what was still called Gtk+ [3]first appeared in March 2002, and the GNOME team working on Gtk [4]declared it dead in December 2020. The final release was [5]Gtk 2.24.33 on [6]December 21 .
[7]
The problem is that quite a lot of apps still use Gtk2. The Debian announcement links to a [8]list of 139 of them – this [9]translated Russian article mentions 34 of the highlights.
[10]
[11]
One of these is the FreePascal compiler and its IDE Lazarus, which over on the FreePascal forums has [12]caused some alarm . The team is discussing possible resolutions, such as creating and maintaining its own packages – a substantial task for a small project.
Some of the higher-profile Gtk2 projects, such as the MATE and Xfce desktops, [13]moved to Gtk3 years ago , but it took a substantial amount of work. Smaller projects, such as the handy [14]GKrellM system monitor , haven't got round to it.
[15]Firefox 148 adds master switch for browser bot bother
[16]Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'
[17]GhostBSD to ditch Xorg for XLibre as Red Hat's Wayland crusade leaves X11 fans out in the cold
[18]KDE Plasma 6.6 isn't forcing systemd but the arguments rage on
Another that hasn't is the Ardour digital audio workstation. The Reg FOSS desk took a brief look at [19]Ardour version 7 in 2022, but development hasn't slackened. [20]Ardour 9.0 came out earlier this month, and [21]9.2 followed this week. We looked at the new release and discovered something interesting and relevant.
Ardour [22]still uses Gtk2 . After Gtk2's end of life, the Ardour team had to find a workaround. The result is [23]its own fork of Gtk2 , known as YTK. It [24]switched to the new toolkit a year ago and [25]removed Gtk2 support six months later.
[26]
This could be a lifeline for the FreePascal [27]Lazarus IDE , which rather impressed us last year. There's a chance here for multiple FOSS projects to get together and make YTK into something more generally applicable. [28]Does anyone have experience in herding cats? ®
Get our [29]Tech Resources
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/01/msg00090.html
[2] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/KH2BKEOZTLV4G6WF5FUXU6RYDPC62UEX/
[3] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2002-March/msg00161.html
[4] https://blog.gtk.org/2020/12/16/gtk-4-0/
[5] https://download.gnome.org/sources/gtk+/2.24/gtk%2B-2.24.33.news
[6] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/tags/2.24.33
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aaB8Nnvsz1Yu8dTPhR2aVQAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[8] https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?user=pkg-gnome-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org&tag=gtk2
[9] https://prohoster.info/en/blog/novosti-interneta/v-debian-14-namereny-prekratit-postavku-gtk2
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aaB8Nnvsz1Yu8dTPhR2aVQAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aaB8Nnvsz1Yu8dTPhR2aVQAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,73405.0.html
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/09/new_qt_linux_desktops/
[14] https://gkrellm.net/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/25/firefox_tbird_148/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/25/bcachefs_creator_ai/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/24/ghostbsd_plans_to_adopt_xlibre/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/24/kde_plasma_66/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/18/foss_digital_audio_workstation_ardour/
[20] https://ardour.org/news/9.0.html
[21] https://ardour.org/whatsnew.html
[22] https://ardour.org/faq.html#toolkit
[23] https://git.ardour.org/ardour/ardour/src/branch/master/libs/tk
[24] https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/commit/1e28ee9cc980f9f93734a2022f04cf2298b2091d
[25] https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/commit/99c1f50a72d513ba9e7f678401d51e8bb0f8912e
[26] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aaB8Nnvsz1Yu8dTPhR2aVQAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[27] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/09/new_lazarus_4/
[28] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE
[29] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Qt is an option for Lazarus. However I wonder if it's better to regard projects such as GTk2 as not dead but "complete". Does sofware have to be in continuous development once it's good enough?
Qt generally works well, but needs a special shim library since FPC has the feature (ardently defended by some if its developers) that it can't interwork directly with code that uses C++ classes etc.
I tend to agree. There is a common mentality that a program must keep acquiring features to be useful. Fix bugs, sure. But keep bolting on more and more features until it collapses under its own weight? This is exactly the problem with C++ (yes, it’s a spec, not a program but the principle is the same) - it’s now so ridiculously complex that many people have given up on it - I know I pretty much have
Look at many of the base unix tools - they’ve not changed in decades but are as useful as ever
No one is patching security bugs
No one is patching non-security bugs.
The software world outside the project (GTK2 in this case) keeps evolving, which means that, sooner or later, there will be interop issues, and no one will be fixing those.
when it stops being maintained, is dead...
"He's dead Jim"
Ongoing tinkering is just as likely to introduce bugs. And interop problems, this being a case in point.
> sooner or later, there will be interop issues
Indeed.
Right now, as I understand it, Gtk cannot handle HiDPI ("retina") displays at all, and I think it has problems with touchscreens too, which Ardour may have addressed in its YTK fork.
With enough Ardour, you can raise Lazarus from the dead.
I'll get my coat...
This one is on me
> With enough Ardour, you can raise Lazarus from the dead.
*Damn* I wish I'd thought of some variant on that!
Well played.
Copyright hereby released to the public domain. Help yourself.
Can I come back in now? ;)
Just ask Claude or Grok to translate it from GTK2 to GTK3, simple as. Or?
Doubt it
Doubt it. It's a very involved process:
[1]https://docs.gtk.org/gtk3/migrating-2to3.html
And that's just for C projects. Language bindings have their own updates and quirks. Also GTK+3 would probably go EOL some years later, so you'll need to port again from GTK+3 to 4:
[2]https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html
At some point it's not worth it and would be easier to port to Qt. It'll only be useful if the LLM somehow figures out a path to go directly from GTK+2 to GTK4.
[1] https://docs.gtk.org/gtk3/migrating-2to3.html
[2] https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html
Free Pascal Compiler and the Lazarus IDE
My understanding is that the FPC issue (that it has precompiled units which support the GTK2 developer libraries) and the Lazarus IDE issue (that on Linux its preferred widget set is still GTK2) are distinct.
The FPC issue appears to have been resolved. It wasn't strictly a problem of the FPC project itself, but appears to have been caused by a combination of Debian policy and a (possibly automatic) checking procedure which refused to believe that a development tool which fully-supports separate compilation didn't require the libraries for everything it referenced (i.e. not just GTK2, but standards like libusb where the compiler etc. is entirely happy if the underlying libraries aren't present).
I also believe that the maintainers of the Lazarus IDE for Debian have resolved the matter by having separate support packages for the various widget sets.