This tutorial shows how to install the latest Beta release of GIMP 3.0, so far GIMP 2.99.10, in Ubuntu 20.04 using the official flatpak package.
What’s New in GIMP 2.99.10 compare to current stable:
- GTK+3 user interface
- Native Wayland and HiDPI support.
- Major refactoring and cleanup
- New plug-in API
- Plugins now possible with Python 3, JavaScript, Lua, and Vala
- More (color) space invasion
- Render caching available for better performance
- Clone-type tools on multiple layers
- JPEG-XL file format support.
- Pinch gesture on canvas for zooming
- New Paint Select tool in the playground
- New generic dialog generation and metadata support API for export plug-ins
- Multi-threaded JPEG2000 decoding
GIMP 2.99.10 is available to install via Flatpak package in the “beta” branch of the official Flathub repository. You can open terminal and run following commands one by one to install it in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 21.10.
1. Install Flatpak framework if you don’t have it (For Ubuntu 18.04 and even 16.04, add this PPA first).
sudo apt install flatpak
2. Add the flathub beta channel via command:
flatpak remote-add --user flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
3. Finally install GIMP 2.99.x via command (for single user only):
flatpak install --user flathub-beta org.gimp.GIMP
Once installed, launch it from ‘Show Applications’ menu and enjoy! In the case, I have GIMP 2.10 (via deb) and GIMP 2.99.x (via flatpak).
NOTE: If you installed both GIMP flatpak stable and beta packages, only one will be visible in app launcher. To make beta version visible, run command:
flatpak make-current --user org.gimp.GIMP beta
And to make stable version visible, replace beta in the command with stable.
Uninstall GIMP 2.99.x:
To remove the package, simply run command:
flatpak --user uninstall org.gimp.GIMP
How to Install GIMP 2.99.2 in Ubuntu 16.04 ??
Alexander Larsson’s PPA offers flatpak package for Ubuntu 16.04 (64-bit only so far as 32-bit package is broken). You can add the PPA via commands:
Then try the steps in this tutorial to install GIMP 2.99.2
As Ubuntu 20.04 no longer support python 2, gimp 2 PPAs are pretty much useless now.
Trying to install 2.99.4 on Ubuntu 20.04 but it requires gnome 3.38 which is only available in 20.10. Can you help explain how I either install Gimp 2.10 with Python 2 support, or install Gimp 2.99 with python 3 support on Ubuntu 20.04 with gnome 3.36
Thanks!
As always: very informative and precise!
Greetings!
OK I fixed the problem I needed to download 700Mb from freedesktop and gnome, I’m very disappointed than overall to only install GIMP (~80Mb) I need to download something near 1 Gb, it’s just insane, I would never recommend a flatpak,
That’s the design issue of Flatpak app. It requires separated run-time libraries, such as GNOME platform, to run the app in sandbox. Sometimes I have GNOME 3.38, GNOME 40 and GNOME 41 platforms all together :(. It does really take too much disk space, but also make possible to run apps with latest features while system default platform is outdated.
Agree, it takes too much disk space, on that note, appimage are nicer than flatpak IMHO.
In all cases, thanks a lot for your articles and a special thanks for your GIMP’s PPA (I love it).
Have an absolute fantastic day.
Hi Ji, just wanted to say thanks for the article. I used to be an English teacher in Japan. , your English seems very good to me.
Since you have been writing for Ubuntu for a long time, have you thought of trying a different OS to help people with, like Fedora? I switched to Fedora because the newest software is often developed by companies purchased by Redhat, like ceph, kvm/virt-manager, podman, etc. you may like it for that reason. Coincidentally, Microsoft (where I am near Seattle) just bought Kinvolk which makes the RedHat CoreOS fork called Flatcar OS, so you can see many big companies are buying smaller companies for their container platforms.
Conversely, SUSE is another large Linux company like Redhat, and they just bought Rancher, and Rancher’s products are in desperate need of good documentation! Maybe they would hire you to write for them, they are based out of Germany. If you’re interested in a full Container OS + orchestration package, check out Rancher’s Harvester. It’s designed to be extremely easy to set up, and it focuses on converting existing virtual machines into kubevirt containers for kubernetes orchestration. Isn’t that neat?
Hope you are having a nice day,
Avery