The Debian GNOME team has formally announced its intention to remove GTK2 (initially released in March 2002) from the Forky development branch ahead of the release of Debian 14, planned for mid-2027.
The reason is simple: GTK2 has been unmaintained upstream since the end of 2020, when GTK4 was released. GTK3, first published in 2011, has been available in Debian’s stable 3.24 series for more than 7 years.
According to the Debian GNOME team, the number of packages still depending on GTK2 has dropped significantly since 2020, to less than a quarter of the original list, but remains substantial. Current estimates cite roughly 150 affected packages across the archive.
The proposal aligns Debian with decisions already taken by other major distributions. For example, Arch Linux removed GTK2 from its official repositories in 2025, relegating it to the AUR, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 shipped without GTK2 support altogether.
Debian maintainers arguing for removal cite security risks, the lack of upstream fixes, and the growing cost of keeping dead software buildable as toolchains and libraries evolve.
One remaining technical blocker, however, is the graphical Debian Installer, which still relies on GTK2. That dependency must be resolved before the toolkit can be fully excised from the archive.
Beyond the installer, maintainers note that GTK2 lacks native Wayland support and does not integrate with modern fractional scaling, even if some applications can function acceptably on HiDPI displays through workarounds.
At the same time, several still-popular applications depend on GTK2, but developers have argued that porting such applications to GTK3 or GTK4 is often non-trivial, requiring major redesigns rather than mechanical updates, and, in some cases, unlikely to happen upstream at all.
As a potential compromise, contributors have proposed moving GTK2 and its remaining reverse dependencies into side repositories rather than keeping them in the official archive. With Debusine now operational, such packages could continue to be built and installed outside Debian proper, as Arch Linux does with GTK2 via the AUR.
At the moment, no final decision has yet been taken, but the path forward is clear. Unless a maintained fork or external repository gains traction, GTK2 is set to disappear from Debian’s main archive before Debian 14.
For more details, you can read the full discussion on Debian’s mailing list.
Seems to be about time to do that.