Easily Trying Out The Latest GIMP 2.9 Git On Ubuntu

If you have been wanting to try out the latest GIMP 2.9 development releases to experience all of the new functionality being worked on for GIMP 2.10, it's relatively easy to do so on Ubuntu.

With noticing a new dark theme for GIMP having been added yesterday to GIMP Git, it reminded me I've been meaning to try out the latest state of GIMP 2.9 myself. This morning I proceeded to work on building GIMP 2.9 from Git on an Ubuntu 15.10 system... There's more dependencies to deal with than GIMP 2.8. Once switching over to the Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) package archive, most of those dependencies could be easily satisfied. However, the GEGL in Ubuntu Xenial was too old for GIMP 2.9 Git. Additionally, libmypaint-gegl wasn't packaged for Ubuntu.

When working to deal with libmypaint-gegl from Git, it wasn't wanting to play nicely with GIMP Git. That's when I discovered the easier approach: there's an Ubuntu PPA with fresh GIMP 2.9 packages.

If you want to very easily try out the latest GIMP Git snapshots and have all the dependencies, simply:

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

More details on the PPA repository for GIMP via Launchpad.net. There are bleeding edge packages for all the latest Ubuntu Linux releases.

In the short time I've been using the GIMP 2.9 package built this week for the PPA, it's been working out well so far to experience the latest GIMP.

The latest GIMP features are noted in part via their road-map. As noted last month, the GTK3 port of GIMP isn't coming until after the major GIMP 2.10 release -- which hopefully will come in 2016.