GIMP 2.99.18: The last development preview before 3.0

<i>&gt; Brush tools now have an additional “Expand Layers” option. When checked, painting past the layer boundaries will cause them to automatically expand so you don’t have to manage the layer size yourself. If you want to expand the layer beyond the current size of the canvas, you’ll need to also check the “Show All” option in the View menu.</i><p>Seriously GIMP devs, instead of this overengineered solution, just <i>get rid of layer boundaries</i>. There&#x27;s a reason no other layer-based image editor has them: they make absolutely no sense and are terrible UX.

Another comment mentioned GIMP may have assumptions of bad UX within their codebase which makes me think about long-lived and large scale projects like this in general. The technical debt of GIMP has been slowly amassing (like all projects) since 1995 (wow!) and I assume that as every year goes by it gets increasingly difficult to do a large scale re-write of any part of the logic.<p>Tools like Photopea[1] come along and throw a fresh perspective at things all the time, these tools never have the breadth and depth of feature support that GIMP has but basically always manage to &quot;one-up&quot; it over something.<p>How long will it take before GIMP has usability on-par with Photoshop? How long until it attains the aesthetic coherence necessary to win people over visually? I love GIMP, but is the battle against 20 years of technical debt even winnable?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.photopea.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.photopea.com&#x2F;</a>

I am very grateful for GIMP, but I hope that the UX can be improved. It gets the job done, but it always feels a bit janky to me. Wish it felt more professional like Photoshop.<p>I didn&#x27;t think this sort of polish was possible for a free program, but after seeing MuseScore and Blender, it gives me hope that it could happen.<p>I know how entitled I sound asking for this ;)

I&#x27;d like to congratulate the GIMP team on the upcoming major release. Lots of volunteer work goes into open source projects, and it&#x27;s remarkable for a codebase to keep evolving over the course of nearly 30 years.<p>To everyone complaining about the UX, let&#x27;s either accept that GIMP does not have the development resources of Photoshop or else propose specific improvements in the GIMP project backlog.

I don’t understand the negativity in may comments, professionals use photoshop or some other tool anyway (if they can afford it), Gimp was always a free, mostly useful alternative for amateurs like me and I am grateful to the contributors.

Gimp 3.0 deserves to be called &quot;Duke Wilber Forever&quot;, with a suitable logo image (hint, hint).<p>Congrats to the team for finally having the finish line in sight !

I used to use Gimp for simple editing needs about a decade ago. I got fairly good at using it back then, but haven’t needed it in a long while.<p>Yesterday I needed to draw an outlined circle… and couldn’t figure out how.

Probably the last time I&#x27;ve heard: &quot;Gimp 3.0 is coming soon&quot; 3G networks didn&#x27;t exist yet.

I use GIMP so often, if the devs ever read this thank you very much!!!

They didn&#x27;t want to have a version 2.100

Congratulations to GIMP team!<p>The 3.0 series represents several thousand hours of work over more than one decade. Soon that is over the finish line :)

There is a 3.0 beta to try?

I love gimp and have used it for ~twenty-five years now without issue. Thank you folks.<p>(Entitled haters that always show up can take a hike. Time to get the downvotes out.)

Open gimp. Try to draw a circle (the outline, not a filled one). You can&#x27;t.

GIMP is infuriatingly good. Its mostly great but has some weirdness that ruins everything in the end. Its issues are like the Spam in that Monty Python sketch.<p>My personally biggest issue I run into almost every time I try to use it is the lack of vector layers for text and some mild primitives like lines, squares and circles you can adjust the properties of after you initally drew them.<p>The other annoyances like for instance the &quot;professional&quot; feature of only saving to xcf can actually very easily be patched if you can compile gimp yourself. They still show a annoing level of pigheadedness from a project otherwse so nice.

<i>&gt; One area we’re “ahead of schedule” on is the much-requested non-destructive editing!</i><p>This is the purest of comedy. I applaud it. And I think a twenty-seven-year-younger version of me who first used adjustment layers in Photoshop in early 1997 [0] might find it even funnier to imagine this future.<p>This isn&#x27;t &quot;skating to where the puck was&quot;. This is &quot;skating to where the rink was before they tore it down and built a shopping mall, that they tore down to build offices that they are now going to tear down to build a retirement home for GIMP developers&quot;.<p>[0] when, I note, GIMP already existed. OK so they got a bit distracted building a GUI toolkit, and we should not forget the significant value it added. It&#x27;s the real transformational product of the entire endeavour.<p>But seriously: this wasn&#x27;t voodoo, weird niche case or hypothetical stuff by the early 2000s, when they were still building a GUI image editing app that really relied on advanced users having Lisp knowledge. And they continued to kick it down the road for literal decades.

They didn&#x27;t want to have a version 2.100

GIMP is one of those things which make me wonder what GNU actually is. It&#x27;s the GNU Image Manipulation Program, but it&#x27;s very obviously dramatically and chronically understaffed. What about the GNU project is preventing them from putting more resources into their image editor?<p>This is not a criticism of the individuals who write code for GIMP.