Post
by athenian200 » 2026-04-25, 20:27
I mean, I don't want to say GTK2 doesn't have any historical value, but it should be noted that most of that value comes from the fact that so many projects used it and were designed around its quirks. It's not because GTK2 itself was great, or was the best toolkit ever. That would be like saying Chrome is a great browser because so many websites work well in it, while ignoring the fact that those websites were designed around its quirks. Or saying the same of IE6 back in the day for the same reason. I feel like it's mostly "good by comparison" in the sense that a lot of people are really unhappy with GTK3 and GTK4, but we really shouldn't let that distort our perception of how good GTK2 actually was, or how far it needs to be extended. My opinion? I would prefer a GTK2 revival to focus mostly on security updates and keeping existing software working as much as possible, I wouldn't want to try and extend it much or use it as the foundation of new projects.
I feel like this is one of those times where you had to be there before GTK2 and not have rose-tinted glasses. Back in the day, and I'm really showing my age here... I really did not like GTK1 or GTK2. My favorite toolkits on Linux were things like Motif and the FOX toolkit because they just worked and were very lightweight. GTK2 applications, by contrast... seemed to me to be fairly bloated and always annoyed me by pulling in GNOME components I didn't want. Yes, even back then, though it has gotten worse. The weakness of GTK2, IMO, was always how it was tied to the fate of GNOME 2 and wasn't really designed as an independent toolkit, which led to distros treating it as something for legacy GNOME environments rather than just something applications were written in. Because a lot of the GTK2 applications that died first? Those were the ones that needed tighter integration with GNOME 2, stuff like glib and all that. Those mostly died or transitioned to newer GTK early on, and people don't mourn them. All that's left are the simpler, tighter applications that needed only the toolkit by itself. There's definitely a bit of survivorship bias going on here.
So yes, on one hand, I'd like to see GTK2 kept alive enough for the applications that depended on it. But I'm somewhat doubting that it's a great idea to put a lot of energy into extending GTK2 or basing new projects on it. That would be giving it too much credit, nothing they really did with it made it that much better than other X11 toolkits (that said, I really agree with everyone's sentiments about Wayland and indeed see it as worse). So yeah, I'm in the weird place of being somewhat on board with not liking Wayland, but also thinking people view GTK2 way too positively because they haven't tried other X11 toolkits that weren't GTK3, and seen for themselves that it wasn't special.
From my perspective, GTK2 winds up being "the best" only in the sense that GNOME was dominant on Linux historically because of Red Hat, and thus it was once the biggest foundation a lot of people were building on and thus remembered by many. So it's only best that came out of the GNOME project, not truly better overall. The very fast that it's seen as the best toolkit Linux ever had just speaks to Red Hat's power and the fact that most have never seen anything that wasn't derived from GNOME, other than maybe KDE, and most users can't figure out KDE or find it overwhelming. A lot of good stuff was overlooked because of GNOME in the past. That allowed their developers to get complacent and arrogant later, because they knew they had no real competition, everyone had standardized on them, and users would have to take whatever they were given. That's how we got to GNOME 3 and 4 being the way they are with us having few good options besides forks of GNOME 2 like MATE. But what I'd honestly like? Something that's built from the ground up to be a solid, traditional desktop metaphor without any GNOME baggage or ties to a specific desktop environment. Maybe something that tries to go for a consistent, conservative appearance across Wayland and X11, treating them as different "platform targets" that have to be accommodated much like Windows and Mac are treated by cross-platform toolkits.
Anyway, I just thought I'd put my two cents in... carry on with the discussion, don't let me ruin the energy too much. I just thought I'd provide a different perspective.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind
