2024-11-06 by GIMP Team

We are very excited to share the first release candidate for the long-awaited GIMP 3.0! We’ve been hard at work since our last development update to get this ready, and we’re looking forward to everyone finally being able to see the results.

So, what exactly is a “release candidate” (RC)? A release candidate is something that might be ready to be GIMP 3.0, but we want the larger community to test it first and report any problems they find. If user feedback reveals only small and easy to fix bugs, we will solve those problems and issue the result as GIMP 3.0. However, we hope and expect a much larger audience to try out 3.0 RC1 - including many people who have only been using 2.10 up until now. If larger bugs and regressions are uncovered that require more substantial code changes, we may need to publish a second release candidate for further testing.

  • Eh, depends. Windows? Sure, it’s highly inconsistent. Their console UIs? Waste of screen space. Office though? It’s so far ahead of Libre Office, it’s not even funny - and I’m saying this as someone who was using Open and Libre Office for decades. Both feel positively ancient by comparison and anything more complex than basic document formatting (which also works far better in MS Office) is a chore.