A Lot Of Improvements Are Building Up For GIMP 2.9.8, Including Better Wayland Support

It's been four months since the release of GIMP 2.9.6 and while GIMP 2.9 developments are sadly not too frequent, the next GIMP 2.9.8 release is preparing a host of changes.

Of excitement to those trying to use GIMP in a Wayland-based Linux desktop environment, GIMP's color picker has just picked up support for working on KDE/Wayland as well as some other Color Picker improvements to help GNOME/Wayland too. GIMP's Screenshot plugin also now has support for taking screenshots on KDE/Wayland either as a full-screen or individual windows. Granted, GIMP won't be all nice and dandy on Wayland itself until seeing the long-awaited GTK3 (or straight to GTK4) port.

GIMP 2.9.8 has also changed the default brush, "paste in place" abilities for pasting from the clipboard to the exact coordinates it was copied from, keybinding support for channels, the blend tool now supports on-canvas gradient editing, the ability to import password-protected PDFs, PSD file handling improvements, and more.

On the build side there is now an official Flatpak stable package on Flathub. Additionally, GIMP 2.9.8 can now be built into a Docker-based build environment.

More details about these ongoing changes for the GIMP 2.9.8 milestone can be found via their NEWS file in Git.