I am unsure from the page, just that it implied: is there software in 2025 still using GTK v1?
I recently found a GTK API call that was deprecated in GTK 3.0, only for its replacement to be deprecated by 3.16. These are not thoughtful people, with a vision for the future. They are idiots that inherited something great (GTK 1), and have spent decades thoroughly fucking it up.
It's a prime example of something that was entirely unnecessary, could have been hidden from the user with a macro, or (pointlessly) added but keeping the old API in place.
They do this all the time. It's not just the idiocy, it's the blatant hostility towards their users that gets me.
The change adds zero value. It's a deliberate API break. And it could have been made a non-breaking change all for the sake of a single one-line macro or inline function.
This isn't unintentional. It's a deliberate choice they have made. And not just this one, it's happened repeatedly over the years.
The thing that really gets me, as an end-user/developer, is that it forces incompatible changes not only in my codebases, but in every other application developer's codebases worldwide. A small change in GTK+ imposes hundreds of thousands of man-hours of maintenance work upon every application developer. And this burdensome work not only takes time, effort and money, it doesn't improve our applications one iota, and on top of that, it breaks backward compatibility so our code will not longer build with older GTK+ versions. Most of us won't be chasing the latest development release, applications might need to target a wide range of distributions with a wide range of GTK+ versions. So it's a logistical nightmare as well.
The lack of concern for the needs of actual application developers is why I eventually had to give up on it entirely. At some point it doesn't make any sense either commercially or for free software development, it's just masochism.
And TBH i do not think Gtk was ever "great", it was just fine and its main feature was availability because of the C API. For some time it was also the de-facto GUI API (during Gtk2 times) for Linux until Gtk3 broke that.
This is also true for KDE and, unfortunately, a lot of modern software. People just don't like building and fixing things.
In the end I just stopped giving a damn and use either a modified microui or lvgl.
Now that said, I do not think the truth is "The maintainers seem to go out of their way to break API, for no reason at all" or "These are not thoughtful people, with a vision for the future. They are idiots that inherited something great (GTK 1), and have spent decades thoroughly fucking it up." Having worked on numerous long-lived APIs in the past, there is always a tension between backwards compatibility and future development, especially consistency between calls. Especially when there are a lot of different contributors, it's very easy for annoying inconsistencies to pop up, and it feels really great to fix those. It's a constant balancing act between the past and the future, and a tilt too far in one direction comes with some significant downsides. I also think some grace is warranted for people giving their code away freely with no expectation in return.
Also, it is easy to call people idiots, but calling people who GIVE you software you can choose to use or not that is not very productive or even nice.
I could call you names but that would only make this discussion worse.
I'm not sure if GTK1 (the linked one) is backwards and/or binary compatible with Gtk 1.2 though.
Searching https://pkgs.org says that most distros don't have a gtk 1 package... except for Slackware!