2024-11-06 by GIMP Team
We are very excited to share the first release candidate for the long-awaited GIMP 3.0! We’ve been hard at work since our last development update to get this ready, and we’re looking forward to everyone finally being able to see the results.
So, what exactly is a “release candidate” (RC)? A release candidate is something that might be ready to be GIMP 3.0, but we want the larger community to test it first and report any problems they find. If user feedback reveals only small and easy to fix bugs, we will solve those problems and issue the result as GIMP 3.0. However, we hope and expect a much larger audience to try out 3.0 RC1 - including many people who have only been using 2.10 up until now. If larger bugs and regressions are uncovered that require more substantial code changes, we may need to publish a second release candidate for further testing.
Blender used to get a lot of stick about it’s UI, but it’s now it’s doing amazingly well. It seams to be freeing 3D from Autodesk.
GIMP seams to be going through a bit of a development phase and after GTK3 move is complete, other features will get the that development. It could be interesting few years.
As for trying RISC OS, no where is especially active to be honest. Though it can be run on Raspberry Pi. The big thing it still does best is save dialogs. Just drag into a file manager window. For the decades after leaving RISC OS I have to copy paste directory paths like a primitive! The ROX Linux desktop gives you a bit of a taste of it, but only ROX apps have the dialog magic. Last I run RISC OS was ArcEmu to play Bug Hunter 1 & 2. I did some open source work on RPCEmu to run games I made as a kid. I should run it again to show the kids what I was doing at their age!
There is one crucial difference between image editing software like Photshop and Gimp vs. 3D software suites like Maya and Blender: My hypothesis is (and feel free to pick this apart) that you can totally teach yourself to use the former rather competently without any outside help, not even documentation and tutorials, but I would argue that this is nearly impossible with the latter due to their far greater complexity. This in turn means that people will look up guides and tutorials and learn the idiosyncratic UI patterns that way, which is why Blender with its extremely nonstandard controls managed to gain a foothold far beyond the broke hobbyist sphere.
Thanks for gently letting me down on RISC OS. I guessed that there wasn’t much going on with it, but I wanted to be sure.