Switching to GTK2 from GTK3 on Post-Beowulf Devuan Releases

brocashelm · 2025-02-27 20:47:59

Note that this is only intended for experienced users. Do not attempt otherwise.

Unhappy with the direction Xfce has been going since the 4.16 release (CSD and all), I've considered just going back to 4.12 (while staying on Daedalus), which I successfully pulled off by preferring Beowulf's repository for all my Xfce-related packages. The problem, however, is that some of them depend on GTK3 (as 4.12 has partial GTK3 support). What I then did was enable the archived repositories for Ascii and even Jessie, and I ensured that my Xfce would be completely unaffected if I decided to run sudo apt autoremove libgtk-3-0.

Another issue is that I had to use the Jessie versions of xfce4-terminal and xfce4-notifyd, as those were already depending on GTK3 as of Ascii. After successfully "downgrading" my packages accordingly, and seeing that Xfce has been purely GTK2-ized once more, I set a negative pinning on the packages to prevent them from being "upgraded". I only had to redo my Thunar configs (although I'm much happier just using SpaceFM as my file manager, even as a transparent overlay on my icon-less Xfce desktop) and set a script for my panel's CPU temperatures (with xfce4-genmon-plugin).

Going even further, I was able to get the GTK2 versions of GParted, GSmartControl, Meld, Gnumeric, Atril, Engrampa, FileZilla, Audacity, EasyTAG, Geany (although I mainly just use Leafpad), and AbiWord back, but some of those had to be done rather "dirtily" to get the results I sought (i.e. by enabling the archived repositories for Debian's Lenny, Squeeze, and Wheezy releases). It wasn't something I wanted to do, but I was able to resolve all dependencies rather carefully.

Maybe it's "Frankensteined" in a way, but I find the system just as functional as before (if not more so now), and I seldomly tinker with software nowadays. I simply wanted to get rid of GTK3 and its problems. Now, some programs I couldn't actually do that, namely with Firefox ESR, LibreWolf, Thunderbird (although I guess Sylpheed remains an option), Alacarte (because I like customizing my menus, and KDE's menu editor flat-out sucks), and Synaptic (which I keep around in case I don't feel like typing up command lines). I couldn't get the GTK2 version of NetworkManager's applet to install, so I'm using the Qt5 alternative in nm-tray.

Has anyone else tried this? I'd be curious as to a different solution from mine.

greenjeans · 2025-02-28 18:07:12

For me, I still have fully functional ISO's of pure Jessie that are all GTK2, archive repo is still available but I have everything I want already, the only program that needed a modern version to work properly was the browser, so I use an appimage of FF. No frankensteining needed.

s1mple · 2025-03-02 12:27:33

That's pretty cool.

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#1 2025-02-27 20:47:59

Switching to GTK2 from GTK3 on Post-Beowulf Devuan Releases

#2 2025-02-28 18:07:12

Re: Switching to GTK2 from GTK3 on Post-Beowulf Devuan Releases

#3 2025-03-02 12:27:33

Re: Switching to GTK2 from GTK3 on Post-Beowulf Devuan Releases

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