Planet GNOME

In the first "The Matrix" movie we have the famous scene of Neo just connected to the computer and opening his eyes and saying "I know kung fu". Something that was really cool in early 2000 sounds like a dystopia to me nowadays.

I don't want to "know kung fu", I want to practice Kung Fu! So I prefer "The Karate Kid" way:

First learn stand, then learn fly. Nature rule, Daniel-san, not mine.

And talking about movies, there are a lot of movies that shows the Hero's journey structure. And it's not relevant if Daniel-san win the last fight or if Rocky defeats Apollo, because the important part of the story is the journey, is the hero starting the adventure and how the path changes him.

And this exact principle applies to everything in live, everyone knows that shortcuts doesn't have value. You can win, you can be faster, stronger, bigger, but you are missing the point, you are missing that "journey before destination" is always true for any Radiant Knight.

In The Matrix the hero's journey is not related to the Kung Fu, and that was just some cool way of introducing the action, the learning is in a different path because in other case we won't have any movie.

Neo doesn't care about Kung Fu, it's just something nice to fight the Agent Smith (What an irony). Daniel-san want's to learn to fight to defend himself, but at the end, fighting is not important, at the end he actually learns karate, and that changes him, and Miyagi and Daniel care about karate.

Gen AI "externalizes" the journey, and it's very tempting to take the shortcut and go directly to get the trophy. But doing that we are removing all the value from the output, we are not learning, we are not doing the journey and we don't change at the end, so actually, using Gen AI is like a waste of time.

No one cares... About something

I've been thinking lately about why people uses AI, because even with all the advertisement and pressure I sincerely do not see any value in using gen AI, I don't need this technology and the only outcome that I'm seeing today is that's destroying everything that I loved or cared about.

But going to the point, if there are so many people using and promoting this, maybe they see some value and thinking about it and just talking with different kind of people I'm starting to see a trend. Most of the people are okay with the usage of AI for anything that they don't care, and of course, they are against the usage in anything that they consider important, everything where they see value.

Designers will say that the AI is generating aberrant images, and stealing the work of others, ignoring copyright and attribution and depreciating the quality, but they will be okay to use it to generate text, translate, write code, etc.

Writers will say that any text generated with AI is poorly written, but they won't see any problem in using a gen AI image for their blog post.

Musicians will be disgusted by the AI generated music, but maybe they don't see any problem playing a vibe-coded video game.

Programmers...

Okay, maybe not everyone follows this pattern, or maybe that's exactly what's happening. Maybe some devs don't care about coding but care about reviewing, others don't care about testing but care about coding, and others don't care at all and vibe-code everything.

I don't see any value in any gen AI usage because I usually care about the output, but also about the process, and the how and why is, most of the times, more relevant than the final outcome.

That's why I try to use only free software, and I'm not using Windows or Mac, that's why sometimes I choose to use a tool just because it's written in python and not in java.

So to me, the quality of code is not more important than the license, it's not more important than technology used, and of course it's not more important than who and why.

Because I care... And you should care too!

I've a "Software Engineer" university degree. But the final paper has no value. What's important to me at the end is that I started that career because my brother introduces me to debian and free software in the 90's. What's important is my relation with peers, professors, my activity in the local Linux User Group, days studying, the failure and the success after understanding interesting math... I don't need an AI generated title, and I don't want people with the "Software Engineer" title, I just want more people to have the opportunity to experience the same growth path, the journey.

What's the value of music? It's just something to listen when you are working, to hide the sound of life that surround you? Anyone that had listen any musician in live sees the value, the difference. It doesn't matter that you can make "better" music and record and play without any mistake, but we value the live performance, because the music is not the important part, the important part is the musician and the listener, the communication. And it's not the same if you listen the exact same song from someone that just lost his father.

What's my job? It's just the code that I write? To me it's clear that's not, and shouldn't be. My job is to create software, I don't care if a gen AI can do that, other people can do that before I started to be able to do it, and I'm not asking others to do it for me.

Of course, not caring about something is natural, no one is interested in all the human activity and just delegate some parts to continue working on what's important to them. But after thinking about it, I can't just ignore it.

Now, when I need an image, that I don't care enough to create myself, I will care just a little to find someone who actually care and delegate to him instead to a big corp AI. When I need some text to read, I will look for someone who actually cares about the text. And, of course, when I need any software or application , that I don't care enough to create myself, I will look for some developer that actually care about the code and for sure I won't ask any gen AI.

We’re glad to announce the release of GIMP 3.2.8! This new stable release contains a number of bugfixes and security updates from new and long-time contributors.

• General Updates and UX Improvements
• Highlighting New Contributor’s Work
• System-specific Updates
• Security Updates
• Around GIMP
  • Documentation for resource makers
  • New Mirrors
• Release Stats
• Downloading GIMP 3.2.8
• What’s Next

This news posts provides an overview of the changes since GIMP 3.2.6. For a more detailed review, check out the NEWS changelog.

Wilber-o’-Lantern, CC BY-SA 4.0, October 31st, 2026 General Updates and UX Improvements⁠

The Add Border filter now allows you to create semi-transparent borders based on the color you choose in the filter.

Jehan fixed a bug introduced in GIMP 3.2.6 when we added better support for cutting/copying from layer groups. Non-rectangular selections on layers within a layer group will now be copied over correctly.

Bruno Lopes corrected an issue where the cursor coordinates did not always update in the status bar when changing between different applications.

denzjos helped us identify a bug with the Levels tool where picking input levels with the Color Picker tool would report incorrect values when working with non-destructive filters. Jehan then developed a fix for it.

Harsh Verma has implemented a new GUI testing suite in GIMP so we can better check for regressions in the GUI during development. He is preparing a news post that will go over this in more detail, which we will share soon!

Jehan improved our font-loading code so that it can be cancelled early (for instance, when quitting GIMP while the fonts are still loading). This should speed up our shut-down times.

Bruno Lopes made improvements to some dialogs so they appear on the correct screen for users with multiple monitors. In addition, the Dot to Dot setting now works again. It was reporting wrong pixel density since GIMP 3.0.

Jacob Boerema backported some fixes for the Metadata Editor and Viewer feature, as part of his larger work in the development branch.

Alx Sa and Bruno Lopes added more definitions to our theme file so that GIMP looks the same on each platform.

Highlighting New Contributor’s Work⁠

All contributions to GIMP from the community are valued! We want to highlight work from some of the newer contributors here.

Infinity made several improvements to our text tool for this release! In particular, they improved text cursor movement when editing Right-to-Left languages and mitigated issues when editing text with negative kerning.
As a side effect of this bug fix, we actually get much better support of RTL text as well as of mix of LTR and RTL texts. The on-canvas dialog now has two new icons for text directions, and the tool automatically detects your base text direction, as defined by rule P2 of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, unless you manually override by clicking one of the buttons.

Showcasing improved support for RTL text - GIMP 3.2.8

Aruius improved our color picking display GUIs, so you see more minor changes in colors when editing.

Chiem Whua Ma helped resolve an issue on Windows where the UI would appear to freeze when moving the canvas after opening multiple images at once. They also fixed a bug where vector layers would be offset incorrect after the canvas was resized.

Manu Cornet has focused on several performance fixes for GIMP. For this release, they improved caching when drawing gradients larger than 6000 x 6000 pixels. They also made the “marching ants” display for selections run more efficiently. Additionally, they improved how channels are displayed in the Channel dock when a dark theme is set. Finally they sped up the display time for the Preferences dialog.

balooii made several fixes as well. For instance, they updated our external copy and paste code to also pass along the DPI settings for the image; this means that other software can properly rescale what you paste if they have a different setting that what you used in GIMP. They also made our Debug dialog themeable and translatable (though we hope you don’t get the opportunity to see their work in this area!)

MrYoranimo fixed an oversight in our raw data import plug-in, where images were not loaded as binary data on Windows. This is a bit technical, but it meant that some raw data might not be interpreted correctly. Their fix ensures that the data is loaded consistently on Windows as it has been on other platforms.

Dimitriy Ryazantcev has continued their work on Windows icon and animated cursors. In this release, they have updated our loading code to match how Windows orders and groups icons in the file.

abderraouf updated our HEIF loading code to allow for loading larger images.

Chomu updated our menu code to allow plug-in and script developers to add submenus in named menu sections. For instance the following code will add a submenu Custom/ below other Paste as actions and your new plug-in action in it:

gimp_procedure_add_menu_path (procedure, "<Image>/File/[Paste as]/Custom");

Also gimp_plug_in_add_menu_branch() has been deprecated (though it was already not working properly anyway so we expect nobody was using it).

System-specific Updates⁠

Bruno Lopes continues their work to improve GIMP’s integration on different platforms. To name a few updates:

• On macOS 27+, title bars are displayed with background colors again. Icons on the menu bar should also appear accordingly. Since the release of Golden Gate, these were being rendered transparently due to breaking changes on the macOS side.

• On macOS 14+, we now use the ScreenCaptureKit API for taking screenshots.

• On Intel-based macOS, GIMP should run without warnings from GateKeeper thanks to us now consistently notarizing Python.

• We now display a 1/0 value for switches on macOS based on the “Differentiate without color” setting.

• Transparency is retained when copying an image from certain apps to GIMP, instead of it showing as black.

• The longstanding “Blank UI” bug that happened on startup for certain macOS computers should be finally fixed!

• Print Preview (aka Image Settings tab) should now work with the Windows 11 Unified Print Dialog on that platform. In addition, Page Setup should now use the correct printer, not just the default one on Windows.

• On Windows, “Merged title bar” settings now play nicer with system features such as minimizing from the task bar and title bar shadowing effets.

• The Screenshot feature now works better on HDR displays on Windows.

• AppImage compatibility was improved to support installing Python Wheels from pip like Flatpak and Snap. Note, however, that our minimum version for 3.2 continues to be a distro released after Debian 13 (Trixie).

Security Updates⁠

As many free and open source software projects can attest, we have continued to receive a large quantity of security reports due to recent advances in software scanning and testing programs. Jacob Boerema and Alx Sa along with new contributors Mike Gorse, Dirk Müller, and Alynx Zhou have proactively responded to and patched these reported issues when applicable.

We take security seriously, but this is not quite as scary as it first sounds. There are no personal accounts or banking information to exploit since we of course don’t access or store that information! The most common report that we get is our older image plug-ins and legacy filters are too trusting of the image size information provided by the image file, and if you intentionally alter this information, you could cause the plug-in (not GIMP itself) to crash.

Around GIMP⁠ Documentation for resource makers⁠

Bruno Lopes wrote two new tutorials on developer.gimp.org:

• Internationalizing plug-ins
• Internationalizing filters

These articles should help plug-in and script developers who want to make their plug-ins translatable, either by themselves or by members of the community. This will be especially helpful as we make progress on creating an built-in Extension repo for easily downloading and installing plug-ins, filters, and more. (More information on that coming soon!)

New Mirrors⁠

Randhost, in Portugal, and ZEROLAG, in Romania, have graciously offered to serve mirrors for GIMP downloads.

Mirrors help GIMP be available for download at high speeds wherever you are in the world.

Does your organization wish to be one of our official mirror sponsors? Create a request to become an official mirror!

Release Stats⁠

Since GIMP 3.2.6, in the main GIMP repository:

• 82 reports were closed as FIXED.
• 46 merge requests were merged.
• 300 commits were pushed.
• 11 translations were updated: Chinese (China), Dutch, Georgian, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.

27 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.8 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

• 10 developers to core code: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Harsh Verma, Manu Cornet, Chiem Whua Ma, balooii balooii, infinity, Chomu, aruius.
• 11 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Jacob Boerema, Dimitriy Ryazantcev, Alynx Zhou, Dirk Müller, Harsh Verma, Jehan, Mike Gorse, MrYoranimo, phoinix.
• 11 translators: Anders Jonsson, Dick Groskamp, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Martin, luming zh, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Ekaterine Papava, Kjartan Maraas, Yuri Chornoivan, Emin Tufan Çetin.
• 1 theme designers: Alx Sa.
• 4 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Harsh Verma, Alx Sa.
• 2 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes.

Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):

• The gimp-test-images (unit testing repository) repository had 2 commits by 1 contributors: Jacob Boerema.
• The flatpak release had 12 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan.
• Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 65 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa.
• Our developer website had 56 commits by 5 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Harsh Verma, Alx Sa, Denis Rangelov.
• Our 3.0 documentation had 197 commits by 8 contributors: Jacob Boerema, Dick Groskamp, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Anders Jonsson, Marco Ciampa, Jehan, Balázs Úr, Yuri Chornoivan.

Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix!

Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through git scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions.

Downloading GIMP 3.2.8⁠

You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org):

• Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Linux Flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Linux Snaps for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Universal Windows installer for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Microsoft Store for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• macOS DMG packages for Intel/x86 and Apple/ARM hardware (64-bit)

Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc).

What’s Next⁠

While we’ve been making periodic updates to the stable GIMP 3.2 branch, we’ve also been hard at work on developing the next version of GIMP. There’s a lot of cool things in progress, and we look forward to sharing more about that with you all soon!

Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!