There seems to be a movement in Linux-land to revive GTK2. Is there any appetite for this in our ranks?
I did do a quick search-and-browse on github and I fail to see where all that GTK2 software is that they say could be compiled and brought back into use. It certainly looks like it’s mostly been converted to GTK3 already. Perhaps its on the old Google Code site.
It would be one more thing to maintain, so we’d have to have a clear idea what we were supporting it for. Still, it is interesting to see developments outside our little bubble and consider how they affect us.
I don’t think(*) there would be much interest in reviving it from our side (at least doesn’t for me), second part would be to find old sources that still support only GTK2 (IIRC pidgin still does? never got that to build yet), or applications that since forwarded to GTK3, even for specific GTK4 targets it’s not that easy to find sources that support it.
While it could be fun to checkout and see where this heads, I still think it’s too outdated atm. (my 2 cents)
I don’t see a good reason for porting GTK2,but technically it shouldn’t be more difficult than GTK3.
I wasn’t sure GTK2 already supports Wayland,but it seems it does.
Anyway,what application that would be interesting to port to Haiku is still based on GTK2?
Most applications from the GTK2 era had much better UX and more features compared to their GTK3/GTK4 replacements,but that’s due to GNOME 3 user interface guidelines,not a technical limitation of newer GTK.
Reviving GTK2 doesn’t bring back the better applications,at least not in a maintained state.
Oh, there seems to be considerable overlap between this and the anti-Wayland XLibre crowd, with the anti-systemd Devuan distro acting as potential host. 2005 called, it wants its Linux back.
So much effort that could be better spent on Haiku
I very much prefer X11 on Unix-like systems,too,because it simply works without any problems and has done so for years (and btw I only use Unixes that don’t even support systemd).
But on Haiku,Wayland compatibility seems to work better than X11 compatibility.
Both aren’t great,but there’s no native GTK rendering backend yet,and I heard that it’s difficult to create one as the GTK codebase isn’t exactly nice and understandable.
