GIMP 3.0 has a release schedule

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

GIMP’s long-awaited 3.0 release, which finally brings a GTK3-based core and better color management, is prompting renewed scrutiny of the project’s priorities and direction. Many users praise it as a powerful free alternative for image editing, but a large contingent argues its interface is outdated, unintuitive, and falling behind competitors like Krita, Photopea, and Blender in usability and development pace. Beneath the feature talk—Wayland support, CMYK workflows, non-destructive editing—runs a broader question of whether a legacy open-source project with limited funding can or should reinvent its UX to reach a wider audience.

Overall sentiment

  • Strongly mixed: some long‑time users describe GIMP as “fine” or “great,” others call it one of the worst UX experiences they’ve had.
  • Thread centers less on 3.0’s schedule and more on longstanding usability, culture, and priorities.

UX / UI and comparisons

  • Many posters find GIMP’s interface confusing, inconsistent, and slow:
    • Features hard to discover, too many clicks for simple tasks, odd side‑effects, and deviations from standard UI norms (e.g., layer list behavior).
    • Especially painful for occasional users who can’t build muscle memory.
  • Several say they can switch easily among Photoshop, Krita, Photopea, Corel, Affinity, etc., but GIMP is the outlier.
  • Others argue it’s largely “what you’re used to.” People who started on GIMP often find Photoshop more frustrating.
  • Krita and Photopea are repeatedly cited as more intuitive, despite Krita also being FOSS.
  • Blender is used as a contrast: historically clunky but significantly improved after its 2.8 UI redesign; some wish GIMP would follow a similar path.

Open‑source culture, priorities, and funding

  • Discussion of common OSS dynamics:
    • Little money for usability studies, reliance on volunteers scratching their own itch.
    • Classic responses to criticism: “fix it yourself,” “fork it,” with acknowledgments that maintaining a fork is hard.
  • Some see GIMP’s project culture as resistant to UX change and name change, which they think limits adoption.
  • Others stress that large user base is not necessarily the project’s primary goal.

GIMP 3.0 features and roadmap

  • 3.0 is expected to bring:
    • GTK3 port, multi‑layer selection, a new “linked layers” concept.
    • Improved color management and late‑binding CMYK export.
    • Lua and JS bindings, plus many features already backported to 2.10.
  • Non‑destructive editing, early‑binding CMYK, advanced color pipelines, and mature HiDPI support are seen as unlikely or uncertain for 3.0.0; some may land in later 3.x.

Wayland and platform support

  • Development builds reportedly run natively on Wayland (not via XWayland), and some users run them on Wayland‑only systems.
  • Roadmap lists Wayland work as in progress; distinction is made between “works on Wayland” and fully polished Wayland support.

AI and plugins

  • Some look forward to Stable Diffusion integration; community plugins exist but at least one is unmaintained.
  • Krita is again cited as already having multiple Stable Diffusion plugins.