The Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software has removed its build support for the GTK+ (GTK2) toolkit in favor of now exclusively relying upon “YTK” as its own localized fork of this toolkit.
In early 2024 the popular Adour digital audio workstation software introduced its own localized, stripped down version of the GTK2 toolkit. The initial motivation for introducing this stripped down version of GTK as “YTK” was due to some Linux distributions removing GTK2 libraries from their repositories. So to make it easier to build the Ardour DAW while Linux distributions work to remove GTK2, they carried a stripped down version of the code themselves.
Over time YTK has picked up some extra features such as touch input support and improved macOS support. Now Ardour has reached the point where it will exclusively rely on its downstream YTK code and removed the build support that allowed running against the upstream GTK2 code.
Back in February the Ardour software made YTK mandatory while this week the application went ahead and removed the GTK+ option from this digital audio workstation software. That’s one way to continue relying on GTK2 era toolkit support without moving to GTK3/GTK4 or another modern toolkit albeit in turn Ardour still relying on the X.Org Server and many other GTK2 limitations with its YTK code.
