After more than three years of development, GIMP 2.8 stable is finally available for download. The new version brings the long-awaited single-window mode (optional; you can still use multiple windows) as well as some other cool new features like on-canvas text editing, multi-column dock windows, a new set of brushes and many other features and improvements.

Update: GIMP 2.8 has been There's no official announcement for the latest GIMP 2.8 yet, but you can download the source from its FTP servers GIMP 2.8 has been officially released.

Single Window Mode: you can finally use a single main window instead of overlapping floating windows. This is optional and can be turned on from the Windows menu.

On-canvas text editing: editing text is not performed in a separate window anymore.

Multi-column dock windows which makes the GIMP UI a lot more customizable

Improved screen real estate for dockable dialogs

Using "Save" now saves the file in the GIMP XCF format and it can't be used for saving PNG and other files. For non-XCF file types, you now have to use the "Export" menu entry.

You can now create layer groups which can be organized in tree-like structures

Brush system and tool preset improvements

You can now tag brushes and patterns

New slider widgets

A new set of default brushes and tool presets from Ramon Miranda (from GIMP Paint Studio)

Brushes can now be rotated

New open window navigation which displays a small preview for each tab

Tools rendering on canvas have been ported to Cairo to provide smooth antialiased graphics

A new "Lock Pixels" feature

Support for JPEG2000 and loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data.

Export color values to CSS, PHP, Java, Python or plain text

Core integration of the graph-based GEGL library

Export to PDF

New tool: Cage Transform which makes it possible to easily warp parts of objects using an adjustable user-defined polygonal frame

Many others

New brushes / tagging brushes

On-canvas text editing

Layer groups

Multi-column dock windows

Cage Transform tool

New open window navigation (tabs with previews)

Install GIMP 2.8 (stable) in Ubuntu

Important: The PPA below provides GIMP 2.8 final for Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin and while the packages in the PPA worked just fine in my tests, the PPA description says that there may be some dependency issues, so use it at your own risk!

To add the PPA and install GIMP 2.8 stable in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install gimp

If you're upgrading from an older GIMP version, instead of the last command above, use the following:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Revert the changes (go back to GIMP 2.6.x)

If you don't want to use the GIMP 2.8 packages from the PPA above for whatever reasons, you can purge it by using the following commands:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge sudo ppa-purge ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp

via Gimpusers

Update: the official GIMP 2.8 release notes are now available @ gimp.org For Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, you can try the Rbose-Debianizer GIMP PPA which provides GIMP 2.8 stable for Ubuntu 11.10, but please note that I haven't tested it!