I love GIMP and no amount of tedious naysaying will ever change my mind
Yo same!
Related to that, Jacob Boerema has implemented PSD Descriptor import support. Most of our current PSD support has been based on the the public Adobe specification. This document was last updated in 2019 however, and modern PSDs use a relatively undocumented text format called Descriptors to store many features.
The battle tested strategy of only providing old standards to others, like MS does.
The UI needs a global overhaul since the day one and still nobody talks about it
I’ve been using Photo Gimp plugin with it for years. Otherwise the interface would be an absolute mess.
I’ve never understood the purpose of PhotoGimp. I get why it exists. But it doesn’t do anything magical that GIMP isn’t already designed to let you do in the first place…which is move around, open, close and organize any window or dock into any place you want.
Anyone who has used GIMP for more than a few days has long since organized it to their own personal workflow; even some that look like photoshop.
The same goes for keyboard shortcuts. You can change literally everything about how GIMP looks anytime you want. So why lock yourself into some script that makes it look like a clone of some corporate crap, and worse…donate to the guy who designed said script as though he made something significant that no one else could achieve.
It’s very existence is a lie. Users aren’t locked into anything and he didn’t do some magic to change that. It’s literally how GIMP is designed to be customized.
Play with it. Have fun with it. That’s the entire point.
It’s basically just a drop in configuration to make it look and feel more like the Photoshop interface. Can you accomplish the same with tinkering? Sure. Do I want the spend all day trying to make it look pretty when I need to actually be working in the software? Hell no. Just drop in the plugin and get to work. It has it’s place. It would be less necessary if GIMP default layout didn’t suck right out of the box.
Can you turn it on and off easily? I know my way around photoshop but still want to learn vanilla gimp.
No it’s not just an on/off toggle. You’d have to uninstall the plugin. Install/Uninstall instructions are on the repo page. https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
I’ve been using GIMP for over a decade. It’s slowly starting to become one of the leading sources of frustration in my computing life. The more I learn about it the less it makes any sense.
Not trying to be negative here. Just saying that a modernization is much needed and I’m really excited for this.
Try FreeCAD if you really want to suffer.
FreeCAD had improved massively since the recent 1.0 release, unlike GIMP…
Use Krita instead. It has a big tiddy anime waifu right on the splash screen.
I haven’t trusted gimp since the first time I watched Pulp Fiction
Leaving this here for Photoshop converts
https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp
I use Affinity full time at the moment, but if they ever go paid, I’m running straight to GIMP.
i completely switched to Affinity suit some 3 years ago at work. I was so excited when the affinity4linux install script dropped. but performance makes it near useless. slow and stuttering.
here is for hoping gimp and inkscape can one day match.
My thing is that I use the iPad app with the pencil. The last time I tried GIMP it was great.
shoutout to diolinux. he does youtube too and is a great advocate for linux and foss.
Krita for the win if you just need the drawing part. Left Gimp long time ago for Krita and never looked back.
i’ve used GIMP since 2017 bc photoshop was ridiculisly expensive and GIMP is free. i still use it. yes its ugly, but it works :3
Very interesting, thanks for the update.
edit: I also love how the article credits every individual contributor for the new features they made, a very nice way to celebrate the group effort
It would be cool if GIMP’s new format could remember the undo history. I sometimes save edited images as XCF projects so I can quickly make a tweak and re-export it if I need to, but if you do something like crop, color grade, etc., and then save it, you can’t undo that later when you reopen the project file because the original, unmodified image data has been lost. You can work around this somewhat by saving unmodified versions of something to its own disabled/invisible layer, but it would make things easier if there was some kind of undo history preservation so you could open a project and sift thru the history of operations performed on the image.
We <3 GIMP
The page 404s
What is the upgrade?
I think that’s the new page : https://testing.gimp.org/news/2026/08/16/dev-update-august-2026/
For the file format, would have been JSON instead XML not the better format? Its lighter and easier to parse and write, meaning more performant than XML.
Agreed. XML has been dead for at least 10 years. Still, at least it’s not YAML.
