My distro recently dropped support for gtk+2 (which I am fairly pissed about, since it’s the last good version of GTK+)
Stuff like this completely throws the shared libraries idea in the bin. There are lots of benefits, sure, but none of them matter when your program won’t even start.
Please name and shame your distro. GTK2 is a core component of userspace for many users, just as important as glibc and bash. Maintaining it might be annoying, but it’s the lesser of two evils.
My distro (Void Linux) dropped support for qt4 a few years back. Now I’m running QUCS in wine. “win32 is the only stable ABI in Linux”
(And yes you’re right 2 is the last good version of GTK+. Gtk3 and 4 look and feel so much worse, they make me feel like I’m being punished.)