A binary requiring webkit2gtk-4.0 would affect roughly 15-25% of current Linux desktop users, primarily those on enterprise Linux distributions (RHEL, Rocky, AlmaLinux) and older LTS releases. Most major desktop distributions now provide webkit2gtk-4.1, though enterprise Linux remains 4.0-only.
The webkit2gtk landscape reveals a stark split: cutting-edge distributions have migrated to 4.1 while enterprise Linux remains firmly on 4.0. This pattern emerged from comprehensive research across distribution families, showing that users on RHEL, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux have zero access to webkit2gtk-4.1 through official repositories, while their Fedora counterparts have supported both versions since 2021.
The distinction matters because webkit2gtk-4.0 uses libsoup2 (HTTP/1.1 only) while 4.1 uses libsoup3 (HTTP/2 support). The two versions are parallel-installable at the system level but cannot coexist within the same process—a critical technical constraint