On 26 October 2020 01:06:59 Pál Tamás Ács <palikacska@gmail.com> wrote:
Technically, Gtk2 and Gtk3 are two different toolkits with a similar name. It's a completely different thing that Red Hat is trying to make us believe that GTK3 is an improved successor of GTK2. It isn't. It never has been.
GTK3 has been very much unstable, full of API breaks and annoyances from the get-go. It's slower due to CPU bloat under certain circumstances, eats up more RAM and is suffering from a serious UX dumbing down to the level of consumer devices like smartphones thus being made less suitable for desktop. Anti-features like mandatory recursive search in File Dialog have also been introduced.
GTK3 was marked stable in many distros despite it wasn't stable at all. Software creators and package maintainers didn't want to migrate to a poorly designed, underdeveloped, buggy graphical toolkit. They either moved forward to Qt or stayed with Gtk2. A famous precedent case is the cancelled GTK3 migration of Audacious. They went back to Gtk2 then moved forward toward Qt.
There must be a cooperation among Linux maintainters outside of Red Hat to save Gtk2 and provide security updates and some critical bug fixes on the maintainer level