GTK2 has been Forked!

Robin

GTK2 will continue to be maintained and developed as a fork, and maintained over at the Devuan Project! A lot of devs are probably secretly very happy about this, saying things like "GTK2 was better than anything that has come after it" (Wayland, GTK 3 and 4, etc). Here is good ol' Bryan Lunduke's latest video on this.

I know that the experimental Gershwin desktop seeks to be less dependent on the two major toolkits (GTK and Qt), which is good. Perhaps this renewal of the tried-and-true GTK2 toolkit will be useful, since so much great software has been written for it.

me12345

Robin
Just curious what all this great gtk2 software actually is ? Almost all FOSS that is still supported by developers has moved on to GTK3/4 or QT ?

Since Gimp and MATE have both moved past gtk2 I can't think of a single modern application that needs GTK2.

Robin

Follow the link to Lunduke's commentary. He explains better than I could why this is good.

me12345

Robin

Lunduke is a former "developer" and long time computer user and reporter. I personally like his retro slant as entertaining, relatable and comical. I'm a big retro computer hobbyist myself (Atari, Commodore, Mac OS, BeOS, early PCs, PS/2s, PowerPC and the ancient through 90's Unixes).

His best video talks about his years at Microsoft:
(1998 - 2003) Yelled at by Gates. Spit on by Ballmer. NT 5, DEC Alphas, Office for Mac, Windows Media Player for Mac, and more.

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/stories-from-inside-microsoft-1998

Ahhh.. praising DEC Alpha, CDE, BeOS, old school Unix and trashing modern development that is Lunduke.

I also feel he can sometimes be disingenuous even misleading people. He said many existing gtk2 apps. Note none that I can find are supported in their decades old gtk2 versions. All the apps he mention have moved on gtk3/4 or modern Qt.

Robin

He's definitely an old-school retro boy for sure. What caught my eye at first with this video was the word Forked. Perhaps because with Big Tech companies pushing stuff like Wayland, systemd, rust, and other nonsensical things to "fix" stuff that ain't broken. Forks under such conditions are probably a good thing!

me12345

Yes being Forked is major plus for the GPL and related licenses. Many forks die out but some then later become more common then the original. LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice being the most well known.

Anyway back to Lunduke he's is bit too polarizing and hated by many in the more liberal leaning FOSS / Red Hat community. I use Fedora KDE as my daily driver so I generally don't reference Lunduke to avoid unnecessary turmoil.

Only old farts like me and some tin foil paranoid types use *BSD so Lunduke is a bit more accepted here... haha.