Debian 14 will drop Gtk2 – unless Ardour rides to the rescue
The Register
February 26, 2026
AI-Generated Deep Dive Summary
Debian 14, codenamed "Forky," is set to drop support for Gtk2, a toolkit that has been widely used since its debut in 2002. While this move aligns with the end-of-life declaration by the GNOME team in 2020, it poses challenges for numerous applications still reliant on Gtk2, including FreePascal and its Lazarus IDE. The removal of Gtk2 from Debian follows similar actions by other distributions like RHEL, SUSE Linux Enterprise, and Arch, which have already phased out the outdated toolkit.
The decision to drop Gtk2 is not without controversy, as many projects continue to depend on it, with over 139 applications listed in Debian's announcement. Among these, FreePascal and Lazarus stand out due to their critical role in the development community. The FreePascal team has expressed concerns about maintaining their own packages, a daunting task for a smaller project. Meanwhile, other desktop environments like MATE and Xfce have successfully transitioned to Gtk3, but smaller tools like GKrellM remain stuck.
Enter Ardour, a digital audio workstation that still uses Gtk2 despite its deprecation. The Ardour team developed YTK, their own fork of Gtk2, as a workaround. By migrating to YTK a year ago and fully removing Gtk2 support six months later, Ardour demonstrated a potential solution for other projects facing similar challenges. This could be an opportunity for FOSS communities to collaborate on enhancing YTK as a viable alternative for legacy applications.
The situation highlights the complexities of maintaining outdated software in a rapidly evolving tech landscape. While Gtk3 and newer toolkits have become standard, the transition process can be resource-intensive, especially for smaller projects. Ardour's experience with YTK offers hope,
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Originally published on The Register on 2/26/2026