Post by @pino@social.cologne

2026-04-28 20:49 UTC

@dazo@infosec.exchange It's great to be compatible to earlier versions. I like how MS does it. Or course you can run all (most) of your software from 30 years ago. There's really nothing wrong with it imho. I don't argue at all against it. I was just asking myself what was the last time I've seen any GTK2. That was probably Gimp (ironically). Beyond Gimp, the last one was... No idea....... But looong ago.

Replies (1)

@dazo@infosec.exchange 2026-04-28 20:58

@pino@social.cologne By all means, if you run an open source project for over 40 years, want to provide backwards compatibility and have capacity for it, do that. But the reality is that very few users will care enough about it - and the software most users use will be updated to use the newest APIs provided. Software needing such support from old library APIs are a niche market for a little minority group. Anyone who expects such support for free need a reality check. Just look at what all the Linux distros does ... they abandon old releases. Enterprise Linux keeps the longest life times - but to stay in support for the very oldest releases, you need to cash out extra. And it's even the same for Windows as well. The glib2/gdk libraries is essentially a huge part of the desktop experience stack in Linux distros, so there are good reasons to call them OS dependencies these days. If there are valid reasons why an old, outdated software deserves to still live - it would be better for everyone if efforts migrating that software to newer libraries was done instead. Make the software relevant again, not the software dependencies the software requires.

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