The Debian maintainers team responsible for packages with GNOME plans not to ship GTK2 tools as part of the Debian 14 distribution, which is expected to be released in summer 2027. The developers of the GTK project stopped maintaining GTK2 more than five years ago, and maintaining the abandoned GTK2 in the main repository is becoming problematic. Among the distributions that have already stopped shipping GTK2 are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16, openSUSE 16 and Arch Linux. Debian is encouraged to follow their example.
Of the significant projects based on GTK2, until recently GIMP remained, but starting with GIMP 3.0 this graphic editor has been ported to GTK3. GTK is also used in the popular sound editor Ardour, but this project does not depend on external libraries and supports its own fork of GTK2 – YTK.
The most serious problem blocking the removal of GTK2 is that GTK2 continues to be used in the Debian graphical installer. There are also about 150 packages remaining in the Debian repository that have dependencies on GTK2, and if GTK2 is discontinued, these packages will have to be removed, since most of them are not developed and will be ported to GTK3 unlikely.
Many of these packages retain active users who do not intend to switch to other programs. There were also developers who advocated maintaining support for GTK2 in Debian and considering the reason for its removal to be far-fetched. For example, mentioning that GTK3 was released 15 years ago does not make sense, since GTK3 does not replace GTK2, just as GTK4 does not replace GTK3.
Arguments such as the lack of HiDPI and Wayland support in GTK2 are also questioned, since it is not needed in it and users are happy with everything. It is inappropriate to compare with Arch Linux, in which GTK2 is excluded from the main repository, but is available in unofficial ones. During the discussion the question was also asked why