2024-11-06 by GIMP Team
We are very excited to share the first release candidate for the long-awaited GIMP 3.0! We’ve been hard at work since our last development update to get this ready, and we’re looking forward to everyone finally being able to see the results.
So, what exactly is a “release candidate” (RC)? A release candidate is something that might be ready to be GIMP 3.0, but we want the larger community to test it first and report any problems they find. If user feedback reveals only small and easy to fix bugs, we will solve those problems and issue the result as GIMP 3.0. However, we hope and expect a much larger audience to try out 3.0 RC1 - including many people who have only been using 2.10 up until now. If larger bugs and regressions are uncovered that require more substantial code changes, we may need to publish a second release candidate for further testing.
There is one crucial difference between image editing software like Photshop and Gimp vs. 3D software suites like Maya and Blender: My hypothesis is (and feel free to pick this apart) that you can totally teach yourself to use the former rather competently without any outside help, not even documentation and tutorials, but I would argue that this is nearly impossible with the latter due to their far greater complexity. This in turn means that people will look up guides and tutorials and learn the idiosyncratic UI patterns that way, which is why Blender with its extremely nonstandard controls managed to gain a foothold far beyond the broke hobbyist sphere.
Thanks for gently letting me down on RISC OS. I guessed that there wasn’t much going on with it, but I wanted to be sure.
Mmm I know what you are saying but I used to work with a lot of 3D game artists. All but a few hated Blender and said they found it counter-intuitive. But really it was that it wasn’t just like 3DS Max and Maya (and it is a bit like Max to be honest). I’m delight over a decade later it’s use has ballooned anyway.
During the same time in games, they switch all the non-2D artists to GIMP to save money. Every time I went into the animation room for something, I could hear “GIMP can’t do X or Y” and every time I could show them how it could. They didn’t want to try and were confused/cross it wasn’t PS.