GIMP 2.10 New Features and Installation Procedure

Brief: 6 years after the release of GIMP 2.8, the major new stable release 2.10 is here. Have a look at the new look and new features. Also learn how to install GIMP in Ubuntu or other Linux distributions.

Free and open source image editing application GIMP has a new major release today. GIMP 2.10 comes six years after the last major release 2.8.

It won’t be an exaggeration if I say that GIMP is the most popular image editor in Linux world and perhaps the best open source Photoshop alternative. The project was first started in 1996 and in the last 22 years, it has become the default image editor on almost all major Linux distributions. It is also available on Windows and macOS.

What’s new in GIMP 2.10

GIMP 2.10 has been ported to GEGL image processing engine and that’s the biggest change in this release. It brings out several new tools and improvements.

Some of the main new highlights of this release are:

• Four new themes: Light, Gray, Dark, and System
• Basic HiDPI support
• GEGL is the new image processing engine providing high bit depth processing, multi-threaded and hardware accelerated pixel processing
• Warp transform, the Unified transform and the Handle transform tools are some of the new tools
• Many existing tools have been improved as well
• Digital painting has been improved with canvas rotation and flipping, symmetry painting, MyPaint brush support
• Support for OpenEXR, RGBE, WebP, HGT image formats have been added
• Metadata viewing and editing for Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM
• Color management revamped
• Linear color space workflow
• Digital photography improvements with Exposure, Shadows-Highlights, High-pass, Wavelet Decompose, Panorama Projection tools
• Usability improvements

If you want to see the GIMP 2.10 features in detail, please refer to its release note.

Install GIMP 2.10 in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions

Since it has been some time from the release, GIMP 2.10 should be now available for most Linux distributions.

In Ubuntu, you can find the snap version of GIMP 2.10 in the Software Center and install it from there.

I advise checking the software center or package manager of your Linux distribution and see if it provides GIMP 2.10 or not. If it does not use either Snap, Flatpak, PPA or source code methods to install GIMP.

Method 1: Installing GIMP 2.10 via Snap Packages

You can use Snap for installing GIMP 2.10. If you are using Ubuntu, you are good. For other Linux distributions, please make sure that you have Snap support enabled.

With Snap installed, all you have to do is to use the Snap command:

sudo snap install gimp

That’s it. GIMP 2.10.x will be installed.

Method 2: Installing GIMP 2.10 via PPA in Ubuntu-based Linux distributions

There is an unofficial PPA available that you can use to install GIMP 2.10 on Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other Ubuntu based Linux distributions right now. Note that the PPA has been updated for Ubuntu 18.04 but not for 16.04. This means it MIGHT NOT work for Ubuntu 16.04 and Linux Mint 18 series.

Open a terminal and use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
sudo apt update
sudo apt install gimp

This will install GIMP 2.10. If you already have GIMP 2.8, it will be upgraded to GIMP 2.10.

Method 3: Installing GIMP 2.10 with Flatpak in Ubuntu-based Linux distributions

You need to enable Flatpak support first. Use the commands below to install Flatpak in Ubuntu.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexlarsson/flatpak
sudo apt update
sudo apt install flatpak

You can refer to this page to know how to enable Flatpak support in other Linux distributions.

Once you have Fltapak support, use the command below to install GIMP 2.10:

flatpak install https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gimp.GIMP.flatpakref

Once installed, if you don’t see it in the menu, you can run it using the command below:

flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP

Method 4: Get GIMP 2.10 source code

Alternatively, you can always install from source code. You can download the source code from the link below:

GIMP 2.10 is a big release with plenty of new features and I am looking forward to use it. How about you? Do you use GIMP? What new features you liked in GIMP 2.10?