It was announced many times via different media GTK 2.x was
no longer in development for quite a lot of time including
issues in SWT.
In order to fix a major issue with SWT GTK 3.x port which
was that the port was started too late, this time we plan to
start early and provide early feedback to GTK developers so
our needs are taken in account instead of things workarounded
late in the game. GTK 2.x support is a real obstacle for this
to happen as keeping so many different code paths (with
entirely different design even in places) makes it not
feasible to start adding GTK 4.x support.
Today, Eclipse PMC agreed that the 4.10/2018-12 release
will drop support for GTK 2.x, set the minimum supported GTK
version to 3.0 and the process to rewrite some parts in pure
GTK 3.x way will be initiated.
If you have any real show-stopper bugs bring them now. The
team fixed most of the important bugs and is now fixing some
lower priority bugs. Do not wait till it's dropped to report!
And pure individual visual preferences are not important
bugs as it's a design choice of SWT to adhere to system
defaults so consider this statement too.
Onwards, to even better SWT!
--
Alexander Kurtakov
Red Hat Eclipse Team