Summary
If you’re a GIMP user, you might have wondered for a while when you’d be getting the long-awaited 3.0 update. The last time we’ve seen a major point upgrade was in 2004, 21 years ago. Now, GIMP 3.0 is finally here after a really long round of testing, and the update is quite packed.
After over a decade of development, the popular open-source image editing software, GIMP, has officially released its long-awaited version 3.0. We’re still awaiting the official release announcement from the GIMP project website, but the GIMP 3.0.0 release has been tagged in Git overnight, and the update is already available through various channels. You can access the new version via Flathub, where Flatpak packages are available. AppImage builds and the source code are also accessible through the project’s download site.
This update has been a long time coming. We’ve had several updates to GIMP 2.0 over the past two decades, with new features and changes, but the release of GIMP 3.0 marks not only the first major update in several years, but also a major milestone for the software in a lot of ways. The most significant change in GIMP 3.0 is the migration from the outdated GTK2 toolkit to the modern GTK3. GTK4 has been out for a while now, so GTK3 is not exactly the latest and greatest—we also don’t know when GTK4 might make its way to GIMP, if it ever will be—but it’s certainly a lot better than GTK2.
This update also brings a modernized user interface, including a new logo, splash screen, and improvements to the Legacy icon theme. Another important focus of this release is color management accuracy, ensuring that older project files (.XCF) from previous GIMP versions render correctly. This is probably a big concern for users migrating from older versions, so it’s good to see that it’s something that’s being addressed. Changes have also been made to plug-ins for formats like BMP and TIFF, with new gradient options added.
The very first release candidate build (RC1) was released back in November 2024, but before this, it was a quiet, albeit long, development period that also saw several revisions to the 2.0 release. The latest release candidate, RC3, was released back in February, and it was already pretty close to the finished product, so it’s no surprise to see that it’s being launched just a month later in its fully stable state. GIMP tends to be that kind of tool that’s not broken and therefore doesn’t need fixing, and for a lot of its users, it already did the job pretty well in its current state. But also, it was in long-overdue need of a revamp, especially when it comes to its internal toolkit—GIMP 2.0 was released in 2004, but GTK2 was released back in 2002 and it was still used in GIMP until today. We’re glad to see we’re finally getting an upgrade.
The update is now slowly becoming available for downloading from your release channels of preference, including Flathub. It’s not live yet onGIMP’s main download portal, but it’s probably just a matter of time before it pops up there as well.
