Xfce's xfce4-panel Says Farewell To GTK2 Support

Following last month's release of Xfce 4.14 that transitioned from GTK2 to GTK3 as its tool-kit, old remnants of GTK2 support are now being nuked.

With the latest xfce4-panel development code, GTK2 support was dropped today and its GTK2 API. This also includes no longer loading GTK2 plug-ins. Moving forward, Xfce's focus is just on GTK3 -- well, until when they decide in the future to switch to GTK 4.0 that should be released in autumn 2020.

The newly kicked off Xfce development cycle following the 4.14 release is for Xfce 4.16 that will hopefully see a release in 2020. For Xfce 4.16 it will likely be a lot of code cleaning -- like this GTK2 gutting -- and improving the infrastructure to help encourage future contributors to the project.