Point Nemo is a nice reminder that some “geography facts” are really optimization problems in disguise: it’s defined by solving the “longest swim” from any coastline, not by some ancient explorer planting a flag.
The fun twist is that the most remote point in the ocean is also our spacecraft cemetery, and sometimes the closest humans to it are orbiting overhead on the ISS.
GTK2 being on life support in 2026 is kind of wild when you remember GTK3 has been around for ~15 years and 3.24 has been “the stable one” for more than half a decade. Debian’s mail here also makes it clear this isn’t a sudden rug pull: they started filing bugs against affected packages in 2020 and the list is already down to <25% of what it was.
The hard part is always the long tail and the installer. If the graphical Debian Installer still depends on GTK2, that’s a good reminder of how much distro plumbing quietly sits on old tech because “it works” and no one wants to touch it. My guess is we’ll see more distros take this approach: aggressively prune old toolkits from the main repos, and push truly unmaintained apps into containers/Flatpaks or community overlays instead of carrying a full compatibility stack forever.
My issue with this is not that they're getting rid of buggy applications they don't want to support. It's that GTK 2 itself is not buggy and has no problems. There are still plenty of people using GTK 2 applications and I personally wrote a handful of new GTK 2 applications over the last year. GTK 3 wasn't a replacement for GTK 2. Just like GTK 4 isn't a replacement for GTK 3. They're separate things.
Droppping perfectly functional GTK 2 itself: not okay.
Other distros like Arch have well supported unofficial repos that still provide the GTK 2 package when it is needed. Debian does not. It does not hurt Debian at all to keep packaging GTK 2 itself and making it available. It is stable software and there have been no changes for decades besides a handful of compiler args to deal with changing compilers.
And GTK 2 does not need to support HiDPI or native Wayland. Just like all the Wayland programs do not support running on xorg or even other wayland compositors not sharing their wayland protocol extensions used. This is not actually a show stopper problem. It is consistent with other software's incompatibility with waylands and would only apply to those actually using GTK 2 applications and those demographics likely aren't wayland adopters.
I get the appeal of “it still works, so what’s the problem,” but from a distro’s point of view an unmaintained C toolkit with a big ABI surface is a problem. Even if GTK2’s code hasn’t changed, it still has to keep building across new compilers, hardening flags, toolchain transitions, security scans, etc.
Arch can shove that into community repos and say “you’re on your own.” Debian’s promise is different: if it’s in the archive, someone’s implicitly on the hook for it for years. At some point it’s more honest to drop it from main and let people who really want GTK2 own it via containers/Flatpaks/OBS, instead of making everyone else carry an orphaned toolkit forever.
And think about how absurd it would be for anyone on the planet to go murder Africans and steal their land under the guise of it being our “homeland”. Sadly that has happened, but they didn’t bother to use that excuse.
It’s worth pointing out that the Palestinian Authority practices apartheid in the West Bank - it’s actually worse than apartheid.
It’s illegal for Jews to enter zones under full control of the PA, and It’s illegal for Arabs to sell land to Jews - that’s a crime punishable by death penalty.
The fact that the Palestinian Authority has made no attempt at arresting the Hamas members also charged by the ICC, shows they do not have sovereignty in Gaza - they don’t have the ability to control and make decisions there.
I actually generally agree with this. How can the PA have sovereignty over an area they basically have never controlled? It seems pretty unprecedented to have a "state" that does not have control of its territory at time of recognition.
That said, it should be noted that the Hamas members publicly charged are all dead now and you can't arrest a dead person (the icc can also make warrants in secret so its possible there are secret warrants). But even if they weren't, it is clear they don't have the ability to enforce justice (or anything else) in Gaza, nor did they have that ability in the past.
