Fedora 41 Hopes The GIMP 3.0 Photoshop Alternative Will Be Ready To Shine

Fedora developers are hoping that the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 will ship before October and be all ready for serving as the default GIMP package with the in-development Fedora 41.

A change proposal has been filed for GIMP 3.0 in Fedora 41. The existing GIMP 2 stable series would still be available as a "gimp2" package but "gimp3" will be introduced and installing "gimp" on Fedora 41+ will also point to using GIMP 3. The change proposal explains:

"This new version involves substantial changes to the technologies used, which in turn means that third party plugins have to be ported to be compatible. Therefore, this change will add the new version as a new package gimp3 which can be installed side-by-side with the existing version 2.x package, so people can continue working on existing projects with the old gimp version and its plugins.

In order to make upgrades seamless for users (and avoid having to go through an exception process for a “new” gimp2 package needing Python 2.x), the existing package will remain named gimp and it plus gimp3 will obsolete the version 2.x packages from Fedora Linux <= 40 in version 41.
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This change upgrades GIMP to a version which doesn’t use ancient 2.x versions of both GTK and Python anymore. Other than many new features including better color management and the support of CMYK import/export, it greatly improves user experience with certain input devices such as tablets and on displays with very high resolutions. Developers of plugins using Python can now use packages and language features which simply don’t exist in Python 2.x."

The GIMP 3.0 change proposal for Fedora 41 is still being evaluated by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but will presumably be fine though some concerns have been raised on the mailing list over the stature of pushing GIMP 3.0 to existing Fedora releases like Fedora 40.

Now for GIMP 3.0 to be released as stable... The 3.0 timeline still points to a "June" target for GIMP 3.0.0 but no release candidate(s) have been debuted yet. They had been hoping for a GIMP 3.0 release in May but that didn't pan out. In last month's GIMP 2.10.38 announcement they pointed to GIMP 3.0 being "very soon!" Now let's hope that means before October so that it will be ready to go with Fedora 41.