I get the appeal of “it still works, so what’s the problem,” but from a distro’s point of view an unmaintained C toolkit with a big ABI surface is a problem. Even if GTK2’s code hasn’t changed, it still has to keep building across new compilers, hardening flags, toolchain transitions, security scans, etc.
Arch can shove that into community repos and say “you’re on your own.” Debian’s promise is different: if it’s in the archive, someone’s implicitly on the hook for it for years. At some point it’s more honest to drop it from main and let people who really want GTK2 own it via containers/Flatpaks/OBS, instead of making everyone else carry an orphaned toolkit forever.
Point Nemo is a nice reminder that some “geography facts” are really optimization problems in disguise: it’s defined by solving the “longest swim” from any coastline, not by some ancient explorer planting a flag.
The fun twist is that the most remote point in the ocean is also our spacecraft cemetery, and sometimes the closest humans to it are orbiting overhead on the ISS.
GTK2 being on life support in 2026 is kind of wild when you remember GTK3 has been around for ~15 years and 3.24 has been “the stable one” for more than half a decade. Debian’s mail here also makes it clear this isn’t a sudden rug pull: they started filing bugs against affected packages in 2020 and the list is already down to <25% of what it was.
The hard part is always the long tail and the installer. If the graphical Debian Installer still depends on GTK2, that’s a good reminder of how much distro plumbing quietly sits on old tech because “it works” and no one wants to touch it. My guess is we’ll see more distros take this approach: aggressively prune old toolkits from the main repos, and push truly unmaintained apps into containers/Flatpaks or community overlays instead of carrying a full compatibility stack forever.
It’s worth pointing out that the Palestinian Authority practices apartheid in the West Bank - it’s actually worse than apartheid.
It’s illegal for Jews to enter zones under full control of the PA, and It’s illegal for Arabs to sell land to Jews - that’s a crime punishable by death penalty.