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Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky
The Debian GNOME team would like to remove the GTK 2 graphics toolkit, which has been unmaintained upstream for more than five years, and ship Debian 14 ("forky") without it. As one might expect, however, there are those who would like to find a way to keep it. Despite its age and declared obsolescence, quite a few Debian packages still depend on GTK 2. Many of those applications are unlikely to be updated, and users are not eager to give them up. Discussion about how to handle this is ongoing; it seems likely that Debian developers will find some way to continue supporting applications that require GTK 2, but users may have to look outside official Debian repositories.
GTK 2 was released in 2002 and was declared end of life with the release of GTK 4 on December 16, 2020; the final release, 2.24.33, was published a few days later. The GTK project currently maintains two stable branches—GTK 3.x ("oldstable") and GTK 4.x ("stable"). The GTK 3.x branch will be maintained until the project releases GTK 5, and the project has not yet announced any firm plans for such a release.
On January 7, Matthias Geiger announced that Debian's GNOME team has a goal of removing GTK 2 from forky before it is released in 2027; in addition to being unmaintained, he said, it lacks native Wayland support and features needed for HiDPI displays.