Recently the release of the new GIMP 2.99.4 version was announced version that is listed as the second prerelease version of GIMP 3.0 and that continues with the development of the functionality of the future stable branch of GIMP 3.0, in which the transition to GTK3 was made.
Standard support for Wayland and HiDPI was added, the code base was significantly cleaned up, a new API for the development of render cache plugins was proposed and implemented, added support for multi-layer selection and editing in the original color space.
GIMP 2.99.4 Main New Features
Compared to the previous trial version, the following changes have been added:
Work has been done to improve the usability of the new compact sliders presentation used to configure filter and tool parameters. For example, problems with manually entering values from the keyboard have been resolved; Previously, clicking the numbers caused the value to change, and now it only sets the input focus, while clicking an area outside the number limits, as before, leads to the adjustment of the values. Additionally, issues with changing the cursor based on context are resolved.
Fixed standard hotkey intersections (Shift + click and Ctrl + click), used to select multiple layers (multi-layer selection), which could lead to the creation or removal of masks on a layer by mistake. To avoid intersections, special controllers that use Shift, Ctrl, or Shift-Ctrl are now triggered when you hold down the Alt key. For example, instead of Ctrl + click to enable / disable layer mask, you should now press Alt + Ctrl + click.
The "Input Devices" dialog has been cleaned up, in which only the parameters of the devices currently connected to the computer remain. Virtual devices and XTEST are hidden. Instead of all the possible axes of the stylus, only the axes that are actually supported by the controller are shown. The names of the axes now also correspond to the names given by the driver (for example, instead of the "X" axis, "X Abs." Can be displayed). If there is support for the pressure-taking axis on the tablet, the device automatically activates pressure accounting mode when editing curves.
Se modified the default settings what applies when a new device connection is detected. When devices are connected for the first time, their use in some tools is now enabled by default.
A new experimental paint selection tool has been added that allows you to gradually select an area with rough strokes. The tool is based on the use of a selective segmentation algorithm (graphcut) to select only the area of interest.
Were added new API calls for plugin development related to dialog generation and metadata processing, significantly reducing the amount of code required to generate dialogs. The PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and FLI plugins have been carried over to the new API. For example, using the new API in the JPEG plugin reduced the code size by 600 lines.
Multi-threaded configurations are provided for plugins. The parameter offered in the configurator, which determines the number of threads used, was previously used only in the main process and is now available to plugins that can determine the multi-threaded parameters set in the configuration via the gimp_get_num_processors () API.
How to install GIMP on Ubuntu and derivatives?
Gimp It is a very popular application so it can be found within the repositories of almost all Linux distributions. But as we know, application updates are not usually available soon within Ubuntu repositories, so this can take days.
Although all is not lost, since Gimp developers offer us the installation of their application by Flatpak.
The first requirement to install Gimp from Flatpak is that your system has support for it.
Already being sure of having Flatpak installed in our system, now yes we can install Gimp from Flatpak, we do this executing the following command:
flatpak install https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gimp.GIMP.flatpakref
Once installed, if you don't see it in the menu, you can run it using the following command:
flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP
Now if you already have Gimp installed with Flatpak and want to update to this new one version, they just need to run the following command:
flatpak update
It is a pity that it is not supported or subsidized by a strong company for its improvement.
Photoshop must be recognized that it takes many years of research, hence how it is today, it even includes Raw AI in the development.
But hey, step by step.