GIMP 2.8.0 Is Finally Near With RC1 Release

GIMP 2.8 has had one hell of a long development cycle with work on it having commenced three years ago, but it looks like this release is nearly ready with the arrival of GIMP 2.8.0 RC1.

In early 2010 there was talk of GIMP 2.8 arriving after Christmas of 2010, then its development efforts became troubled, the developers remained ambitious for future releases, was revised again to be released in November of 2011, and then moved to an early 2012 release. It's now Q2'2012 and we're still talking about when GIMP 2.8.0 will finally ship.

GIMP 2.8 is a big change for this open-source graphics/imaging project with the long-awaited single-window mode, new features, and various other work over the past three years. Well, nearly four years (GIMP 2.6.0 was released in October of 2008).

GIMP 2.8.0 RC1 was uploaded today to their FTP server. If there's good news out of this delay is that this latest release does incorporate the latest version of the GEGL library, which now offers OpenCL support.

Let's hope we'll see GIMP 2.8.0 final ship before summer arrives.