- Red Hat has announced that they will be dropping the GTK 2 support with their next major RHEL release, coming in 2025.
- This decision is likely to affect all of the major Linux distributions; the GTK 2 support might drop from many distros.
- There are currently a few Linux software that still relies on GTK 2; one of the most popular ones is GIMP 3.0.
One of the enterprise-focused Linux distribution providers, Red Hat, has announced that they will remove the GTK 2 support in their next major Red Hat Enterprise Linux release; to be more precise, RHEL 10. This particular release is expected to land in 2025, so do not expect some immediate action from the company.
Only a few software still relies on GTK 2
GTK 3 has been out for 11 years, and GTK 4 was released at the end of 2020. As is the case, many of the Linux software have been ported to GTK 3 or GTK 4; there are only a few Linux software that still utilizes GTK 2; GIMP 3.0 seems to be one of the most popular ones.
The organizations that never ported their internal software to newer versions of GTK however, might face a couple of problems when Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 is released. Red Hat’s decision is expected to affect other Linux distributions as well. Thankfully developers have 3 years to port their software to GTK 3 or GTK 4.
The announcement came from Tomas Popela, the principal software engineer at Red Hat. Popela said;
« This is an early heads-up about GTK 2 removal from RHEL 10+ (the gtk2 package was marked as unwanted in ELN. The toolkit served us gratefully, but it starts to show its age regarding modern technologies such as Wayland, HiDPI screens, HDR, and others.
In RHEL 10 the GTK 3 and GTK 4 will still continue to be available for everyone to use. »