Yep. I still develop Gtk2 applications today. It's a very snappy and low resource usage toolkit aimed entirely at desktop computers. None of that "mobile" convergence. I suppose you could put Gtk2 applications into containers of some sort but since Gtk2 has (luckily) been left alone by GNOME for decades it's a stable target (like NES or N64 is a stable target) and there's no need for it.

Most of the bloat these days is from containers and Canonical's approach to Ubuntu since ~2014 has been very heavy on using upstream containers so they don't have to actually support their software ecosystem themselves. This has lead to severe bloat and bad graphical theming and file system access.

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WD-42 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Can you point us to some of these gtk2 applications that you’ve been writing recently?

	▲	superkuh 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, one is connmapperl. It is a server/client application where the server is a GUI map of the world that shows all the various clients collected IP established connections via geoip lookup (local). It stores everything in sqlite db and has a bunch of config/filtering options; http://superkuh.com/connmapperl.html Technically a fork of X11 connmap I made because I coulnd't get it to run on my old X11, but with many, many more features (like offline whois from raw RIR dumps, the db, the hilbert mapping, the replays of connection history, etc). Another one is memgaze, a program to vizualize linux process virtual memory spaces as RGB images and explore them using various binary visualization and sonification tools. Ie, you can just click a hilbert map of all processes then in the new window click around inside the image of that particular process' virtual ram and then listen to it interpreted as an 8bit wav, or find an extract images, for example. Or search for strings, run digraph analysis, etc. http://superkuh.com/memgaze-page.html Or feeed.pl, my very quick and low resource usage feed reader for 1000+ feeds written in Perl/Gtk2 that is text only (no html, no images, etc). It is really handy for loading .opml files and finding and fixing broken feeds using the heuteristics I hard coded in to find feed urls. http://superkuh.com/blog/2025-09-13-2.html These are a few I made 2025-26 that other people might care to use. But I have a lot more that just scratch my own particular itches. Like a Perl/Gtk2 version of MS Paint that interprets arbitrary loaded and painted images as sound, or the things that I use to monitor my ISP uptime/speed, etc.