Debian 14 will drop Gtk2 – unless Ardour rides to the rescue
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Many dependent apps, including FreePascal and Lazarus, face the chop.
Version 2 of the widely used Gtk toolkit will be dropped from the next Debian release. The problem is that many things still need it, including FreePascal and its Lazarus IDE.
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 Gtk2. It’s already 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+ first appeared in March 2002, and the GNOME team working on Gtk declared it dead in December 2020. The final release was Gtk 2.24.33 on December 21.
The problem is that quite a lot of apps still use Gtk2. The Debian announcement links to a list of 139 of them – this translated Russian article mentions 34 of the highlights.
One of these is the FreePascal compiler and its IDE Lazarus, which over on the FreePascal forums has 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, moved to Gtk3 years ago, but it took a substantial amount of work. Smaller projects, such as the handy GKrellM system monitor, haven’t got round to it.
More here: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/26/debian_14_will_drop_gtk2/?td=keepreading
Debian team announcement: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/01/msg00090.html
