How far away is GIMP 3 from GIMP 4?
How far away is GIMP 3 from GIMP 4?
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I tried the Flatpak development release of GIMP 3 and there are already big problems with UI consistency.
For example the forced theming makes it unusable on KDE, this issue describes the too big UI very well and in general it seems like it doesnt make sense to have these huge UI elements on a compact App like GIMP.
Meanwhile apps like Inkscape are on GTK4 afaik, and GTK stands for GIMP ToolKit (or GNU ToolKit?). So its kinda ironic they are upgrading to GTK3 just now.
It seems they are also just doing some cleanup in the code, so I wonder how big the step to GTK4 would be?
And it problems like too large UI elements or theming problems could be fixed.
I believe Inkscape is still working towards GTK4, but yes they are much farther ahead, to be expected when there are more developers active, after all.
GTK has long outgrown GIMP, it's much more general purpose now, though the acronym remains. Who knows, maybe it'll be renamed to GTK Toolkit in full MIT hacker style one day
It's the GNOME ToolKit now
If I had to guess when GIMP will be native GTK 4 I'd say no sooner than five years, more likely it'll be 10. By the time GIMP runs on GTK 4 we'll be working with GTK 5 or 6.
I don't know how long it will take but it should be much much less work now that gnarly UI elements as old as GTK have been replaced with modern toolkit ones.
Within 500y
lightyears you say?
Who cares? I am fine with the way it is, I am just going to be annoyed with the UI being updated anyways. I am still annoyed by the thunderbird update cause now dark reader takes a second to give me dark mode emails.
Dark reader works? I am using dark background light text and that doesnt work, also some addons are not yet in the Thunderbird store. I can recommend ublock origin with custom *.zip *.mov filters, essential
Thunderbird got better, even though advanced filters are now gone? Not sure when.
But modern Toolkits are important especially for Wayland support