I checked on Gimp’s GTK3-Port and I saw like 200 patches to have been landed.. inside a few seconds. With this pace, Gimp will make Photoshop history in a week -the most :)

That would be too good to be true, and actually it is just a Git rebase, but most changes are coming towards Gtk3. No matter what, is a good reason to try it out.

First of, Gimp3 is scheduled after 2.10. Right now latest Gimp is 2.8.10, but if you compile it from Git, you will get 2.9, which is the unstable version prior to 2.10.

Gimp3 Requirements

m4_define([babl_required_version], [0.1.11]) m4_define([gegl_required_version], [0.3.0]) m4_define([glib_required_version], [2.36.0]) m4_define([atk_required_version], [2.4.0]) m4_define([gtk_required_version], [3.4.0]) m4_define([gdk_pixbuf_required_version], [2.26.0]) m4_define([cairo_required_version], [1.12.2]) m4_define([cairo_pdf_required_version], [1.12.2]) m4_define([pangocairo_required_version], [1.29.4]) m4_define([fontconfig_required_version], [2.2.0]) m4_define([gtkdoc_required_version], [1.0]) m4_define([webkit_required_version], [1.6.1]) m4_define([alsa_required_version], [1.0.0]) m4_define([rsvg_required_version], [2.36.0]) m4_define([wmf_required_version], [0.2.8]) m4_define([pygtk_required_version], [2.10.4]) m4_define([poppler_required_version], [0.12.4]) m4_define([libcurl_required_version], [7.15.1]) m4_define([libgudev_required_version], [167]) m4_define([gexiv2_required_version], [0.6.1]) m4_define([lcms_required_version], [2.2]) m4_define([libpng_required_version], [1.2.37]) m4_define([liblzma_required_version], [5.0.0]) m4_define([openexr_required_version], [1.6.1]) m4_define([gtk_mac_integration_required_version], [1.0.1])

Gtk is set to version 3.4, so Gimp won’t use the very latest widgets of Gnome 3.8 and 3.10, like the new Lists, Tabs, Header-less Bars, etc. At least not at the moment.

Gimp3 is going to use the black variant of Gtk, which maybe is too dark for such a program. All icons need rework, plus there are lots of “aesthetics” bugs, like the black rulers.

I didn’t do any much, besides there isn’t a point to see how good Gimp3 works. It is far from complete, but whatever I did, it worked. With a crash exception.

I had done a post with the state of Gimp3, some months ago. Gimp3 is definitely better today, but it suffers from the same bug as then. Under certain circumstances, it consumes lot of CPU and it becomes unresponsive.

The good news is that I encountered this bug only when I was switching from-and-to Single-Window Mode.

Gimp doesn’t require much more than Gegl and Babl to build it. Those two libs might be hard to be installed in some systems though :/

If you want to give a try, get it from:

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/

and checkout to “gtk3-port” branch.