GTK2-NG — Modern Community Fork of GTK+ 2.24

Unofficial, community-maintained fork keeping GTK2 alive and usable on modern 64-bit Linux systems.

This fork focuses on modern compatibility while preserving stability, performance, ABI compatibility, and original behavior as much as possible. X11-first, no forced Wayland migration.

Backed by the devuanusers.com community.

Highlights

Conservative GTK+ 2.24 maintenance with ABI compatibility as a priority
Modern build-system and compiler-warning cleanup
Compatibility fixes for current GCC, Clang, Autoconf, Automake and Libtool
Selected safe patches from AUR, BSDs, Gentoo, Fedora and GTK2 maintenance forks
Y2038-related internal time-handling improvements where ABI-safe
Modernized private-data handling in many GTK/GDK classes
Improved GtkFileChooser with optional icon view and better icon handling
Preserved classic list view, GTK2 theming, engines, modules and legacy paths
Continued focus on performance, low overhead and responsiveness

Roadmap

Continue removing deprecated internal API usage where safe
Improve file chooser responsiveness for large and network directories
Add best-effort thumbnail generation and optional preview support
Improve compatibility with traditional GTK2 themes and engines
Add XDG-aware config, theme and icon lookup paths while keeping legacy paths
Review Ardour's YTK GTK2 fork for portable, ABI-safe improvements
Review further GTK2 maintenance forks for useful fixes
Preserve CUPS/PPD printing workflows and add libppd support for newer CUPS
Keep GTK2 useful on modern Unix-like systems without breaking existing apps
Choose a better long-term project name

Build Instructions (Linux)

Safe test install (strongly recommended)

autoreconf -fvi
./configure --prefix=/tmp/gtk2-ng-test --with-xinput=yes
make -j$(nproc)
make install

Run apps against the test build

export GTK2_TESTDIR=/tmp/gtk2-ng-test

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$GTK2_TESTDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$GTK2_TESTDIR/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
export GTK_EXE_PREFIX="$GTK2_TESTDIR"
export GTK_DATA_PREFIX="$GTK2_TESTDIR"
export GTK_PATH="$GTK2_TESTDIR/lib/gtk-2.0"

leafpad   # or any other GTK2 app

System-wide install

autoreconf -fvi
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --with-xinput=yes
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install

Dependencies (Debian/Devuan/Ubuntu)

sudo apt install build-essential autoconf automake gtk-doc-tools libtool pkg-config \
    libglib2.0-dev libpango1.0-dev libatk1.0-dev libcairo2-dev libfontconfig1-dev \
    libx11-dev libxext-dev libxrender-dev libxinerama-dev libxi-dev libxcursor-dev \
    libxrandr-dev libxfixes-dev libxcomposite-dev libxdamage-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev

(Adjust for Arch, Gentoo, etc.)

How to Contribute

Join the main discussion here:
https://devuanusers.com/thread-gtk2-revival-thread--80

Test apps, report issues, submit patches!

License

LGPL v2.1 or later (same as original GTK+)

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