This is a short development update on our progress towards the first release candidate for GIMP 3.0. We recently reached the string freeze milestone. What this means is that there will be no more changes in user-facing text (like GUI labels and messages) so that translators can work on the final translations for the 3.0 release.
we’re currently at 96% completion for the 3.0 RC1 milestone, with 11 issues remaining.
for how long it has been in development, neither 96% nor 11 issues remaining give me confidence in short-term completion.
But given the wording around it, I guess it has to be not too far off - whatever that means. I'm not hopeful about anything, but looking forward to it. GIMP has been my main "heavy" image editing tool for a long time.
All features aside, I hope it will launch faster than previous versions.
Ive noticed that for some reason it launches in 1-2 seconds on Linux Mint as opposed to like 10 on Windows for some reason. Seems weird, since based on the status messages it seems like the rate limiting step is opening a bunch of Python modules, which shouldn't be drastically different between OSes??
My interpretation has always been that it loads [too] many files. File performance on many [small] files is noticeably, significantly slower on Windows than it is on Linux.
It's still not full CMYK. Only import and export gets true CMYK support, and editing is still RGB (but with CMYK print preview). They said full support is planned for the future, as they have too much to worry about at the moment. With 3.0 they lay the ground for future features.