GIMP 3.0 has been more than one decade in the making as the port from GTK2 to GTK3, also transitioning away from Python 2 to Python 3 support, and a wealth of other improvements from the UI to lower down into enhancing this open-source Photoshop alternative.
The GIMP project announced on X/Twitter today that they have entered the string freeze for this much anticipated release.
GTK 2 has been EoL since 2020 (GTK 3 released in 2011). GIMP 3 marks the completion of the GTK 3 port, which by itself offers:
- Moving to an actively supported version of GTK (and future migrations will be easier because the difference between 3 and 4 is a lot less than the difference between 2 and 3)
- Better graphics tablet support
- Better handling of HiPPI displays
- Better Wayland support
- Should also mean that they finished refactoring the code, thus making it easier to implement new features.
And on that last point, I would say that the biggest benefit overall with the release of GIMP 3 is that we’ll finally, finally start seeing serious work on implementing non-destructive editing; I’ve read that some of the preliminary work is going to be shipping with the 3.0 release.
