Just had a look at the GIMP 3.0 milestones page and saw this.
Am I missing anything or is GIMP 3.0 actually going to be released soon?!
I hope they make it in time for Debian 13 to include it.
Yeah that would be sweet!
Should be.
3.0.0 RC3 is already the version being used in the Trixie (Testing) repo, and there’s a little under 30 days now to release the final version before the soft freeze next month.
This is good news. There are a lot of great FOSS alternatives on Linux, but raster editing is one of the last few blind spots, I’ve found.
- Krita is designed more for painting,
- MyPaint also seems designed more for digital artwork (and, perhaps just in my experience, but it also seemed rather unstable and kept crashing)
- KolourPaint is very barebones (seems to be much more a replacement to MS Paint than anything else, so can’t really blame it for that)
- Inkscape is a vector editor. 'Nuff said.
- Pinta is the closest to Paint.\NET you’re gonna get on Linux, except it’s based on before the latter went closed-source (bastard…) and as such it’s not as feature-complete as Paint.\NET is.
GIMP, meanwhile, doesn’t even have nondestructive editing and also can’t draw basic shapes (like squares, cylinders, etc.), can’t seemingly rotate layers without opening the
[floating RMB menu] > Layer > Transform > Arbitrary Rotationdialog window, and good GOD the floating menus can go fuck themselves. How I hate the floating menus. Did I mention the floating menus suck? Not sure if I mentioned that.Anyway, this switch to 3.0 is really needed and I’m genuinely excited to see the changes it brings, to the UI and the UX in particular.
Just a shame that they’re switching over to GTK3 when most other developers seem to be transitioning to GTK4.
Yes I agree, great news!
Just to clarify for anyone reading this who hasn’t heard - GIMP 3.0 brings non-destructive editing.
It looks like the UI is going to be pretty similar for the time being but the developers have set up dedicated groups to work on it. I’m probably one of the rare people who is used to it/likes it as it is and doesn’t really want to re-learn it if it changes but anything that helps new people get involved and feel positive using and improving GIMP is welcome in my book. On the surface it might look like all that has happened in 3.0 is the introduction of Layer Effects but my understanding is that the whole thing has been re-written to make it easier and faster to make future progress with it. Hopefully this will be a reboot for GIMP!
Finally a tip; to rotate a layer press Shift+R :)
GIMP 3.0 brings non-destructive editing.
Ah, that is good news! I actually heard about that but kinda forgot, so thanks for reminding me.
It looks like the UI is going to be pretty similar for the time being
Balls.
but the developers have set up dedicated groups to work on it.
Well there’s that at least. It seriously needs a tune-up in that department.
I’m probably one of the rare people who is used to it/likes it as it is and doesn’t really want to re-learn it if it changes but anything that helps new people get involved and feel positive using and improving GIMP is welcome in my book.
I appreciate your candor and your position. I know it must have been many hours of struggle to figure everything out to the degree you have. But as you said, this would help new blood get in the door. After all, sure, overcoming a program’s overly obtuse UI & UX is definitely a thing to be proud of, but frankly it shouldn’t be that obtuse in the first place. Very few people have, or even should be expected to have, the patience to struggle for a half-hour (or more!) to figure out things that in most other programs can be done in seconds. (This isn’t an exaggeration; I’ve had to do this, and only because other programs on Linux were no better.)
On the surface it might look like all that has happened in 3.0 is the introduction of Layer Effects but my understanding is that the whole thing has been re-written to make it easier and faster to make future progress with it. Hopefully this will be a reboot for GIMP!
This is good to know! I’m frustrated with GIMP but I still love the ideas it represents, and am hoping it improves to be able to meet the expectations users want to have of it!
to rotate a layer press Shift+R
You are a goddamned saint.
No probs :)
I’m kind of ambivalent about the criticism of GIMP’s UI/UX; I can see it from both sides. Over the years I’d tried it out a few times when I was having problems with Photoshop but it wasn’t immediately obvious how to replicate my workflow. I figured that GIMP was either poorly designed or simply didn’t have the functionality at all and quickly lost faith in it. Around a year ago though, I started exploring it more seriously as I had switched to Linux at home. For some reason, this time I had a ‘flashback’ to when I’d been lost and frustrated when I first started learning Photoshop 20 years ago. After investing some time in watching some GIMP tutorials, reading some articles/forums/documentation and messing around - in exactly the same way as I had with Photoshop - I was able to work 95% as effectively in GIMP as in PS.
I’ve also explored switching to it from Photoshop in a professional setting and what I’ve concluded is that there are a few tools that currently work more efficiently in PS (and some in GIMP to be fair, although less of them), printing is less flexible (at least on Windows 10/11) and that hardware acceleration would be welcome! Once you know where everything is in the menus and dialogues and either learn or change the keyboard shortcuts, the UI is not such a barrier to using GIMP effectively in my opinion.
Where it is a barrier though is when you’ve been using Photoshop week in week out for a couple of decades and it’s seared into your neural pathways! Even now, because I’m still using Photoshop at work, I get mixed up. As things stand right now, with Adobe’s vast resources and the fact that Photoshop has become a universal standard for raster editing, it will be hard for something like GIMP to catch up with it in popularity, let alone overtake it and start setting the agenda for UI/UX expectations. GIMP developers have to spread comparatively minuscule volunteer hours between adding new features, innovating new ones, fixing bugs and improving the UX. On the one hand I think it would be sad to see GIMP losing some of its identity in attempting to be a direct clone of Photoshop but on the other hand I think that it may be the only way it will win over enough users from Photoshop to break out into the mainstream and receive the support that it needs to develop at a faster pace. It should definitely be pointed out too that Adobe are also actively making their own offering worse by ‘enshittifying’ it, seeking to exploit users work and becoming unreliable on some people’s hardware. Just the fact that nobody can be sure whether or not work done for clients using Adobe software can be exclusive any more blows my mind in a professional context.
TLDR: I think GIMP is great but different, just got an awesome update, and has every chance of getting even better!
Sorry, I wasn’t expecting to write such a long comment. Time to have lunch!
I think you will find progress accelerate with the release of 3. They did a lot of groundwork and factoring, it’s one of the reasons it took so long. But now that the work is done, it will allow for more rapid changes in the future. I’m hoping it will be kinda like Blender 2.8 or Godot 3.
Oh that’s good! Thanks for laying that out for me. And, please, don’t take what I say as bashing the one guy who’s working on this (at least I hear it’s only one person). I think for a single person it’s incredible what they’ve gotten to, and I salute them for that. I was merely explaining it from an objective viewpoint. I have very little but respect for the guy behind it all.
I generally agree with you, GIMP is way behind the commercial options. And is almost unusable by the lay person and is lacking features a professional needs, which leads it to be almost useless for the majority of people. I use it, but also get frustrated at it every time I do. Let’s hope 3 really is an inclection point.
Improvements to the UI & lossless editing are nice, 20 years too late, but nice. Outside of that we are still 19 years behind PS, feature parity is impossible, anywhere near the same productivity is impossible :/
Feels like the foss community is a bit unlucky with gimp, there are so many truly great productivity tools outside of this one area.
Exactly.
And even with the stuff it can do takes 10x longer to do than with most other raster editing software because the UI and UX is so darn convoluted. Like, seriously, I want to like GIMP, but frankly I and most people in fact ain’t gonna spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to rotate a layer. Lol.
Frankly, at this point, I just wish Paint.\NET was able to be run on Linux, but I believe it still uses some Windows-specific components—can’t remember what they are—that can’t quite yet be replicated properly using Mono. (Might be some Windows-specific DLLs? Idk.)
Just a shame that they’re switching over to GTK3 when most other developers seem to be transitioning to GTK4.
The switch from GTK3 to 4 won’t be as much work as they did with the recent GIMP 3 update. Because they did more than updating GTK, like lot of ground work and basically a rewrite of most basic stuff and adding new functionality. So don’t be fooled by the idea it would take ages to update to GTK4, at least it won’t take as much time as GIMP 2 to GIMP 3 update.
Oh I did not realize that! Excellent. :)
I mean, it has been about to come out for about a decade. But I think the last few releases were release candidates for 3.0.
Yes, that’s right. It looks like the actual 3.0 release is about to happen though 😊
aaaaaaany moment. Iam running RC3 and its pretty solid.
Me too! I can’t wait 🪇
Oooooh, can’t wait to see the new features!
[what? there is no new features…?]
Can’t wait to see the new splash screen! 😇Are Layer Effects not enough for ya?!
Depends… I’ve been running 2.99 for a while now 😄
That’s cheating!
But then I have been on 3.0rc2… 🤫
I think the release date is on the 16th, they’ve had a couple rounds of RCs and it seems like it’s finally happening!
These last two comments seem to point that way:
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gimps-master-branch-string-freeze/22895/22
Aw great now that I’m finally starting to get used to using GIMP 2… /s
Haha it’s OK, I’ve been testing out the pre-release versions - you should be able find everything :)
Opensuse already updated to 3.0rc some time ago
does it come with CMYK settings yet, or did that already happen in a past release i missed?
