Redhat announced that the GTK2 toolkit will not be supported by the next major release of RHEL. While the GTK2 toolkit has been used in Linux applications for a long time, GTK3 has been available for over a decade and GTK4 has been available for two years ….. …RHEL10 will likely be available as a stable release in 2025.
Most of the well-known Linux software has been ported from GTK2 to GTK3 or GTK4, but there are a few exceptions – GIMP and its long-awaited GIMP 3.0 version are still in use, but will eventually abandon GTK2.
As a result, most users will not be affected by RHEL 10 dropping GTK2 support, and hopefully GIMP 3.0 will make the transition in the next three years, along with the few other older programs still using GTK2. However, this will be most problematic for internal programs in companies and organizations that are still running in production and have relied on GTK2 for years without ever migrating to GTK3. Software engineering teams in these organizations would be wise to consider migrating to a newer toolkit or plan to stick with their existing enterprise Linux distribution until the end of its lifecycle.
With Red Hat planning to see GTK2 removed from RHEL10, other enterprise Linux distributions may take a similar route.
The announcement summarizes the removal of GTK2 from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 as follows
"The toolkit has served us well, but in terms of modern technologies like Wayland, HiDPI screens, HDR and others, it's starting to show that it's starting to age."
