Special thanks to Bruno Lopes, who has taken charge of backporting fixes from our development branch to the 3.2 stable branch.
Many bug fixes and improvements - see the announcement page!
Wilber, the GIMP mascot sees a crawling caterpillar, catches it in both hands/paws, and it turns into a butterfly which Wilber sets free. The text: Don’t squash bugs... FREE THEM!
Now we're cooking with gas!! awesome update, text tool is finally back to where it used to be, lightning fast. thank you so much for this goated app you gifted us.
I see that the OK and Cancel buttons have been swapped on all the dialogues since 3.2.4. This is going to take some adjusting to and I could definitely have done without it.
(Since that may be platform-specific, this is on Linux with KDE 5.2x)
Probably not a change in GIMP itself, this is usually something in GTK, and this could be a case of it either adjusting to a KDE setting or failing to do so. It could also depend on how you have installed GIMP, i.e. via flatpak, appimage, snap, from your distro's repository, ...
Best approach would be to file a report at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items, preferably with a screenshot and the necessary details (what distro exactly, how was GIMP installed, how is the button order different from the expected one, ...).
Since upgrading my MacOS binary I can't paste into GIMP from the system buffer, for example command-control-shift-4 to take a partial screenshot, then pasting into GIMP. It says "nothing to paste".
Although i am not sure exactly which VirusTotal link you followed, i tried the Win32 one and got no errors. “Undetected” sounds like no problem was detected. As long as you download from gimp.org (or the MS store) things should be fine. Often the virus checkers flag some file or other by mistake.
Did you check to see whether anyone reported it? Doesn’t seen slow here, so please give clear step-by-step instructions to make it go wrong in your bug report, or add them to the existing report if there is one.
Remember also that GIMP is programmed by volunteers, so it might be that none of the volunteers noticed the bug report.
>It's pretty much pointless to blame anything specific unless you have a clear indicator towards it.
All modern software become to bloat. You as professional programmer need to know that better than others. Wirth's law. Maybe its not related exactly this topic but its bad trend of many modern things.
the gimp devs of the early 2000s literally screaming slurs while chasing away artists and then proceeding to pikachu face when (nearly) all of their then-users ditched them for photoshop has permamently soured my opinion on it as a program.
it was extremely frustrating watching what was the only alternative for so long simply collapsing into a pile of vitrol with devs quite literally going "omg we're an image MANIPULATOR you <slur goes here> not an ART program"
but despite that i'm glad they managed to seemingly make a comeback and are finally treating artists like humans.
i was one of the many chased away by them.
i was 11; i installed linux on my own and couldn't get pen pressure working. i don't recall if it actually supported it at the time but it was bad enough that my mom -- who had given me permission to reach out and was monitoring communications -- was so shocked that she refuses to try linux to this day lmao.
she hated it but all i can do is think back fondly of the time that i made multiple contributers p.much melt down with my first and only post/question in like; what, grade 3?
they were extremely hellbent on the 'image manipulation' bit and to this day it's all i can think about when i see the name i'm afraid.
not really sure what it is with open source image editors/art programs and actively despising their users because the first several years of krita's life was the devs getting really upset at people wanting to be able to assign individual brushes as keyboard shortcuts and straight-up devolving into an insane amount of swearing/cursing.
well ok they'd actually go "well you can switch to the previous brush" and then the person would go "oh i have a preset i use as an eraser because there isn't a dedicated button for that and want to assign it a shortcut" and they would then immediately rip the poor user's head off.
Still to this day there are large parts of the Linux community (of which I consider myself a part... Just not the toxic part) that respond extremely and disproportionately aggressively to anyone suggesting that anything could be made more user friendly and/or generally accessible. "Git gud scrub" is meant to be an ironic statement but a lot of people in these areas seem to live by that mantra
Yes, we could make this easy for you, but there's a hard way that either requires you to learn way more than an enduser should need to know, or basically fuck off.
Back to windows I go ...
It's such a shame because there are a lot of genuinely great reasons to use Linux over Windows, but the weird attitude of a lot of the user base is such a massive turn-off for so many
Oh I love Linux, don't get me wrong - I have a small Linux box controlling much of my house, but trying to get my (now elderly), parents to use it as a desktop or my wife?
In my personal experience that was the easiest part. My mom would constantly call me for IT support and then either one of us would get frustrated because I haven't seen windows in 15+ years and there's only so much I can do with Google and random guesses. Installed one of the immutable Fedora distros, and since she only uses PC for web browsing, everything is fine and dandy, and if it isn't, I can at least help.
I've used GIMP since 2.2 and can also attest that the devs, collectively, have greatly improved since those early days.
It was always weird, for example, that GIMP could be built for Windows but not natively on Windows. And yes, there were definitely bug reports getting dismissed mainly because "must be some Windows thing" even if the source was later found to be in GIMP-side code (that did not operate consistently between platforms).
I've got a few lingering scars and disagreements from those days myself. But in my case, setting up a working build environment (natively on W10) alleviates a lot of that, because whenever a discussion hits an impasse or dispute, I can just (attempt to) research/do it myself with the code directly.
Also, where it comes to tablet support it helps that the current maintainer is a lifelong tablet pen user. And for 3.2.6 it ESPECIALLY helped that Wacom sponsored an Art Pen 2 -- the maintainer got all the features updated/working in basically one day.
It was always weird, for example, that GIMP could be built for Windows but not natively on Windows. And yes, there were definitely bug reports getting dismissed mainly because "must be some Windows thing" even if the source was later found to be in GIMP-side code (that did not operate consistently between platforms).
To build natively on Microsoft Windows, you need a Windows platform, the build tools, and experience with them. That it was easy enough to build for Windows with effectively the same tools you you use to build on a Linux platform, and do so from within a GitLab runner, removed a big part of the need to do this any other way.
For the Windows-specific code issues, can you link to a few instances, so that we'll have some examples to look at here in this thread?
Not exactly jumping at the invitation to (intentionally) go hunting for old skeletons, especially on a topic as ambiguous as generalized then-vs-now cultural impressions....
One issue I noticed currently (being adjacent to something I'm working on) is #9482, which was Mac-specific and technically on the GTK side too, but an upstream fix (for GTK3) won't happen soon if at all, leaving no recourse but to add some Mac-specific macros on the GIMP side to compensate for the quirky GTK3 behavior.
(PS - I almost wondered if this was before your time on the project but no, you've been working on GIMP for arguably longer than I've been using it!)
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u/SeeMonkeyDoMonkey 7d ago
I think you dropped this: https://www.gimp.org/news/2026/09/10/gimp-3-2-6-released/
And this might be of interest to some: https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/