Debian 14 will drop Gtk2 – unless Ardour rides to the rescue

Debian 14, codenamed "Forky," is facing a significant compatibility challenge as the development team plans to drop Gtk2 support in the upcoming release. This decision, while aligned with broader industry trends, threatens to orphan numerous applications that still depend on the aging toolkit, including the FreePascal compiler and its Lazarus IDE.

The Gtk2 Sunset

The timeline for Gtk2's deprecation has been clear for years. Originally released in March 2002, the toolkit's development team declared it end-of-life in December 2020, with the final release (Gtk 2.24.33) arriving on December 21, 2020. This extended lifecycle is typical for foundational open source components, but the reality is that many applications never completed their migration to Gtk3 or Gtk4.

Debian's move follows similar decisions by major distributions. RHEL, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE 16, and Arch Linux have already removed Gtk2 from their repositories. The Debian team has identified approximately 139 packages that still depend on Gtk2, with a Russian translation highlighting 34 particularly notable applications.

The FreePascal Crisis

The impact on FreePascal and Lazarus has generated particular concern within the community. The FreePascal forums are abuzz with discussions about potential solutions, including the daunting prospect of maintaining custom packages. For a relatively small project, this represents a substantial maintenance burden that could divert resources from core development.

Ardour's Unexpected Solution

Here's where the story takes an interesting turn. The Ardour digital audio workstation, which still relies on Gtk2, faced the same existential threat as other Gtk2-dependent projects. Rather than abandoning their codebase or undertaking a massive migration, the Ardour team took a different approach: they created their own fork of Gtk2.

Dubbed YTK (presumably "Yet Another Toolkit"), this fork represents a pragmatic solution to a common problem. Ardour switched to YTK a year ago and completely removed Gtk2 support six months later. The project has continued its rapid development pace, with Ardour 9.0 released earlier this month and 9.2 following this week.

A Potential Lifeline

The existence of YTK could be transformative for other Gtk2-dependent projects. Rather than each project maintaining its own fork or undertaking individual migrations, there's an opportunity for collaborative maintenance of YTK as a general-purpose solution.

The FreePascal Lazarus IDE, which impressed us during our review last year, could particularly benefit from this approach. The IDE's sophisticated GUI development capabilities make it a valuable tool for the Pascal community, and losing it from Debian would be a significant blow.

The Herding Cats Problem

While the technical solution appears straightforward, the social and organizational challenges are substantial. Coordinating multiple independent projects around a shared fork requires:

• Agreement on maintenance responsibilities
• Coordination of release schedules
• Resolution of potential conflicts in feature development
• Sustainable funding or volunteer commitment

The Ardour team has demonstrated that maintaining a Gtk2 fork is technically feasible, but scaling this to support multiple projects with diverse needs presents a different challenge entirely.

Industry Context

This situation reflects broader tensions in the open source ecosystem between innovation and backward compatibility. While Gtk4 represents significant improvements in performance and capabilities, the reality is that many useful applications don't justify the engineering effort required for migration.

Distributions like Debian face difficult trade-offs. Maintaining old versions of libraries increases security risks and maintenance burden, but removing them can break essential tools for users and developers.

Looking Forward

The next 18 months will be critical. Debian 14's release schedule means there's time for affected projects to coordinate around YTK or find alternative solutions. The success of this effort could serve as a model for handling similar situations in the future.

For now, the fate of Gtk2 in Debian 14 remains uncertain. If Ardour's YTK can evolve from a single-project workaround into a community-supported toolkit, it may yet save numerous applications from obsolescence. If not, the FreePascal and Lazarus communities, along with dozens of others, will need to find alternative paths forward.

The situation perfectly illustrates both the strengths and challenges of open source development: rapid innovation and community collaboration, balanced against the practical difficulties of maintaining compatibility across a diverse ecosystem.