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.
When did you try GIMP last time? For me, it opens up almost instantly (~1 second) on my modern PC with Linux. And I am still on version 2.10. In the past (few years ago) a major slowdown on start was because of too many fonts or a corrupted font cache. Nowadays GIMP loads fonts in a different way, and starts fast regardless of how many you have.
There might be another reason why the startup was slow for you. But usually it should not be, unless your CPU is old and if you do not use SSDs. My recommendation is to try it out again and then troubleshoot with the community to find out whats slowing it down.
I use it on Windows. Admittedly it launches better in Linux but it takes an age to launch in Windows. But yes, that was some time ago. Version 2.04 or something like that.
There was major improvements on start time since years. I don’t think you tried v2.04, because that version is from 2004 (exactly 20 years old): https://www.gimp.org/about/history.html But I didn’t meant to be ACKTUALLY here. Even v2.8 is from 2012. Whatever version you had, try it again. Especially with the upcoming v3.0 major changes and improvements are coming as well, so its worth it probably and hopeful.