After a Decade of Waiting, GIMP 3.0.0 is Finally Here!

We have many open source image editors on Linux, but the GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP for short, stands out the most due to its feature set and thriving community of developers.

Completely maintained by a team of volunteers, GIMP has been the de facto standard of image editing on Linux for a long time now. Its Windows and macOS versions are no less, providing decent competition to the proprietary likes of Adobe Photoshop and Pixelmator Pro.

However, over the years, its user interface and experience had started to feel dated, and there were calls for new features to be added to it. Back in 2015, the developers announced the GIMP 3.0 release, which would tackle these issues.

Sadly, there were some delays that caused the release to stall quite a bit throughout the years. But now, we are at the end of the first quarter of 2025, and the release has finally come out with loads of improvements across the board.

Let's check it out. 😃

GIMP 3.0: Better Late Than Never

Even though the wait was long, this release looks like it was worth it, as there are many significant upgrades and long-anticipated features in GIMP 3.0. These cover the user interface, the editor, and how the developers intend to handle the release schedule going forward.

The key highlights of this release include:

• GTK 3 Port
• Editor Upgrades
• Release Schedule Changes

GTK 3 Port

Bringing GIMP into the modern era is GTK 3, which has enabled the image editor to provide a more polished user interface experience, making it more visually appealing and putting it on equal footing with other modern GTK-based apps.

As a result, we get better compatibility with high-DPI displays, better integration with desktop environments like KDE and GNOME, and vastly improved theming, which has been made easier to work with.

I understand that many applications have moved to GTK4 now, but GTK3 is still a big leap for GIMP.

Now, GIMP has a simplified theme system with a Default theme and a System theme, each offering three modes: light, dark, and gray. These themes can be paired with either the Legacy icon set or the Default icon set, which includes Color and Symbolic options.

Similarly, there is a new Wilber logo designed by Aryeom of the GIMP Web Team, who took the original logo (created for GIMP 2.6 back in 2008) by Jakub Steiner and gave it a contemporary twist.

Editor Upgrades

Powered by GEGL and babl, the GIMP 3.0 release features the most comprehensive color management and non-destructive editing capabilities of any previous versions of GIMP.

With non-destructive workflows, image editing operations like filters, adjustments, transformations, and more are possible without altering the original image, giving the user control over when to commit the changes.

The GIMP team has also worked on color values being shown accurately on GIMP, with XCF project files created with GIMP 2.10 and before being compatible with GIMP 3.0, ensuring that even older projects can be worked on without issues.

Additionally, file format support sees significant upgrades, with the DDS plug-in now handling 16 and 32 bits per channel RGBA images, GIF files preserving animation when overwritten, and HEIF and JPEG-XL now loading metadata through their respective libraries, libheif and libjxl.

Release Schedule Changes

Finally, we have the revised release schedule, where the developers have decided to push out smaller, feature-focused releases more regularly. These will either be micro releases (e.g., 3.0.x) or minor releases, like GIMP 3.2, which is set to arrive within a year of the 3.0 release.

This approach aligns with the release policy change introduced in GIMP 2.10.0, allowing new features to be included in micro versions.

🛠️ Other Changes and Improvements

Before you go to download this release, you should also be aware of the following changes:

• An official AppImage for GIMP is finally here.
• There is now support for loading 16-bit LAB PSD files.
• BMP files are now losslessly imported, preserving the original quality.
• Improvements to Image Graph now allow non-destructive stacking of filters.
• Importing and exporting images between GIMP and darktable has been refined.
• It is now easier to load images from Google Drive and other remote/cloud platforms without the need for manually selecting a file format.

You can read about these changes and much more on the official release blog.

📥 Getting GIMP 3.0

This release is available on the official website for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Linux users can also get it from Flathub, Snapcraft, or the software manager of some distribution.

Basically, if you are using Ubuntu, use Snap to get it. Although at the time of writing this article, GIMP 3.0 had not landed in Snap stable release yet.

For most other distributions, you can get it from FlatHub where version 3.0 is already available.

On the other hand, if you want to build from source, then the project's GitLab repository should be your next stop.

💬 What are your thoughts on this release? Was it worth the long wait?