By Ian Hollidae, 2024/11/08

It's been a good year for open source graphic tools. Back in the summer, Blender released version 4.2 LTS (long term support). Last month, Inkscape released 1.4 described as the "geek" version. And now, GIMP has finally gotten around to unveiling a release candidate for the long awaited version 3.

The GIMP release actually came as somewhat of a suprise. The new version was scheduled for early summer, but when that didn't happen, and no real movement was evident during the fall, I figured they wouldn't do anything at all this year.

One interesting thing about the announcement was an entire section dedicated to the change in GIMPs release process. The norm from now on will be smaller releases:

What [GIMP] ultimately want is to make smaller and faster release points. We gathered features we want to work on in separate roadmaps, though they may be spread through several releases, or oppositely released in a single GIMP version.

For now, it's just nice to know things are really moving forward. Maybe I'll break my own rule about avoiding broad/general reviews of new software (I tend to focus on task related items). However, if a new GIMP is out, I guess anything is possible.