GIMP - GIMP 2.10.38 Released (original) (raw)

This (possibly last) GIMP 2 stable release brings much-requested backports from GTK3, including improved support for tablets on Windows. A number of bug fixes and minor improvements are also included in this release.

This news lists the most notable and visible changes. In particular, we do not list every single bug fix or smaller improvement. To get a more complete list of changes, you should refer to theNEWSfile or look at the commit history.

New features and improvements

Improved support for tablets on Windows

Before this release, GIMP only supported connecting tablets on Windows through WinTab drivers rather than the newer Windows Ink drivers. Because of this, we received a number of reports about tablets having issues with unresponsive buttons, incorrect pressure sensitivity, lagging brush movement, and mid-stroke position changes.

These problems were due to a limitation of GTK2, as support for Windows Inkwas implemented in GTK3 by long-time contributor Luca Bacci. For this release, Luca was gracious enough to backport this support to GTK2. You can now switch between WinTab and Windows Ink drivers (if supported by your computer) in the Preferences dialog under the Input Device settings.

Windows Pointer Input API option in GIMP 2.10.38

Windows Pointer Input API can now be changed - GIMP 2.10.38

Backports of other GTK3 features

Luca also contributed a number of other featuresfrom GTK3 to GTK2. Some of the backported improvements include updating the size of the Print Dialog so buttons are not cut off, fixing issues with pop-up dialogs appearing behind the previous ones, and several fixes to keyboard input.

These improvements are primarily for Windows and are already included in the 2.99 development release. However, we are very happy that these quality of life improvements are now available in this stable release of GIMP 2.10!

Bugfixes

Recent crashes

Two commonly reported crashes have now been corrected. A change in GLib 2.80 exposed a bug in our closing process and caused a crash on exit. Luca Bacci once again devised a fix for both 2.10.38 and the upcoming 3.0 release candidate. Another crash that some users encountered when making very small selections was also fixed.

Other fixes

A number of other small bugs were fixed in this release. Among them:

Release stats

Since GIMP 2.10.36:

25 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 2.10.36 codebase (order is determined by number of commits):

Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):

Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix!

Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through git scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions.

Team news and release process

Idriss, 2023 GSoC contributor, has been recently granted “developer” access on the main source repository, for the awesome continued job since then.

Ville Pätsi, very long term contributor (more than 20 years!), on various topics (design, theming and more) got the “reporter” access to Gitlab to help with triaging and organizing directly in the tracker.

Around GIMP

Mirror News

Since our last news, 3 newmirrors have been contributed to GIMP by:

This brings us to a total of 49 mirrors all over the world.

Mirrors are important as they help the project by sharing the load for dozens of thousands of daily downloads. Moreover by having mirrors spread across the globe, we ensure that everyone can have fast download access to GIMP.

Infrastructure and Hardware Sponsors

We enhanced the sponsor page with 2 sections:

Downloading GIMP 2.10.38

You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org):

Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc.).

What’s next

Clearly one of the smallest releases ever in the 2.10 series, and it might be our last. We’ll see, though we also know some people get stuck longer than others on older series (especially when using <abbr="long term="" support"="">LTSdistributions of Free Software operating systems), so we might do (if we feel like it’s needed) a 2.10.40 release with bug fixes only just before or just afterGIMP 3.0.0 release, as a wrap up.</abbr="long>

In any case, we are now stopping backporting features in the 2.10 series. These graphics tablet support improvements for Windows are huge enough that they had to get in; yet from now on, we want to focus solely on releasing GIMP 3.0.0.

Now you might wonder when that is? Very soon! We are on the last sprint towards the release candidate. This includes a lot of bug fixes, but also still some APIchanges going on. We will keep you updated!

Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMPdevelopers, as a way to give back andaccelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger! 💪🥳