GIMP Team announced today that GIMP, the most popular Photoshop alternative and whose acronym stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, will now be available in a new packaging format. The news is that they will be the ones developing and maintaining the GIMP snap package. Until now, the snapcraft package was packaged by what are known as snapcrafters, volunteers who do not work for Canonical, whose purpose is to upload snaps to their store. Mark Shuttleworth and company acknowledge the work of the snapcrafters, but do not officially work for them.
These snapcrafters are, in a sense, the "owners" of the packaging. As those responsible, the GIMP Team had to ask them for permission to take charge of packaging and uploading the software. In other words, they had to request that they transfer everything necessary so that the program's developers would also be the ones to upload the snap package.
GIMP works with snapcrafters to upload their own snap package
The project and snapcrafters have spent months working to make the transition smooth, and what's available now is a stable package packaged by the official development team.
The change isn't all positive. The snapcrafters' version included some plugins by default. The version released by the GIMP team is "vanilla," pure, with no extra software. As an alternative, they've released gimp-plugins, which works similarly to the org.gimp.GIMP.Plugin Flatpak extension. GMIC and OpenVINO snaps can now be installed.
La version 3.0.6 It's the first from the official team, but the work was done in conjunction with the snapcrafters. To install it, just open a terminal and type sudo apt install gimp. A preview version is also available that installs with the command sudo snap install gimp --channel=preview/stableAnother option is to install the software from a compatible app store, which, for now, isn't Ubuntu's App Center, because it has a bug. You know, in the blacksmith's house...