A lot of distributions are trying to remove GTK2 though so it's only a matter of time until that breaks. Slackware will probably still have it though (and they still ship GTK1 which is fantastic!)

Recently i fixed the Gtk1 backed for Lazarus[0] which uses Gdk_pixbuf for pretty much all bitmap operations as it provides more advanced functionality than plain Gdk. Sadly while Slackware had Gtk1, it didn't have Gdk_pixbuf.

I did hunt down some old version of Gdk_pixbuf and made it to build (at least on my system)[1] so it isn't that big of a deal.

I attempted removing the dependency at some point (when i wrote the text at the second site i hadn't explored that part of the code much so i was under the impression that it made little use) and while possible, it needs a lot of functionality to be reimplemented in terms of fpimage (graphics functionality that i guess didn't exist when Gdk_pixbuf was originally used). I did stub out all the Gdb_pixbuf code though and while glitchy, it does work[2].

I might poke on it now and then but i'm not part of the Lazarus dev team and whenever i fix any bug on Linux it is for the Gtk2 backend since that is what i'm using (i have no plans nor interest for the later versions of Gtk).

[0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/gtk12/

[2] https://i.imgur.com/su9JCUY.png