besides being unmaintained for years, GTK 2 does not support either HiDPI or native Wayland.
Isn't the whole point of Xwayland to allow you to use things that can't/won't be updated to native Wayland? (And doesn't it allow mutter or KDE's compositor to scale those, even if they're not natively resolution independent?)
If these are good enough reasons to get rid of packages, why bother with Xwayland at all?
They mention Arch "dealing with it" but Arch stuck it into AUR... if someone stood up a PPA for gtk2 for the time being then this would feel like less of an issue to me though.
jmtd | a month ago
Note the relatively large thread that follows this original post (disclaimer: I’m in it)
Edit to add: theres some good coverage on LWN. Here’s a subscriber link: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1051006/cca40e623d86fa72/
hoistbypetard | a month ago
Isn't the whole point of Xwayland to allow you to use things that can't/won't be updated to native Wayland? (And doesn't it allow mutter or KDE's compositor to scale those, even if they're not natively resolution independent?)
If these are good enough reasons to get rid of packages, why bother with Xwayland at all?
inactive-user | a month ago
Because you can still use GTK2 on Debian 14, just not from the official packages.
Xwayland is intrinsically operated by the window management code of the wayland compositor, so is less viable to remove from official packages.
There are also other things than GTK that depend on X11 that do not have an upgrade path like GTK does.
And most importantly its because the Debian GNOME team is not selling their work, so in a way, any reason is a strong reason.
rtpg | a month ago
yeah that feels pretty weak...
They mention Arch "dealing with it" but Arch stuck it into AUR... if someone stood up a PPA for gtk2 for the time being then this would feel like less of an issue to me though.
dvogel | a month ago
No comment on the removal but I really appreciate Debian's "if it ain't broken don't fix it" disposition that leads to this situation.
bsder | a month ago
Too many people got used to freeriding on dependency maintenance and that is now breaking.
There are now too few people coding on open source. And maintenance is less rewarding than development so has even fewer coders.
It's a tribute to some very dedicated people that they kept it this long.