I’m aware of Debian’s reputation for not having the most up-to-date software in its repository but have just noticed that Thunderbird is on its current version. Which makes me ask:
When does Debian update a package? And how does it decide when to?
I’m particularly interested in when it will make available the upcoming major release of GIMP to 3.0.
You can always use APT Pinning to grab GIMP and its dependencies from
testingwithout touching the rest of the system.Or you can just run
testingorsidas your base system. My gaming rig is based ontestingbut pulling Mesa and video derivers fromexperimentalandsidand I haven’t had any issues with it. Been running it for about 2 years now this way.never run debian testing for production use
never run debian testing for production use
debian testing is not fit for production use
On servers, I agree. OP just wants a recent version of GIMP though. Production can mean many things, and dogmas are never the answer.
what i mean by production is “not randomly breaking because it’s feature freeze time and now i have to reinstall everything”. i assure you it’s not a high bar
sorry if i sound a little annoying about this, it’s just that i’ve seen so many people recommending debian testing as if it’s just a different flavor of debian for people who want a more up-to-date system and are willing to deal with a little instability, but it is not that. debian testing is made exclusively for testing debian. it is not made for daily driving. i’ve had so many issues with debian systems in my lab which i later found out were caused by someone “upgrading” the system to testing bc they heard debian testing is the daily driving version and debian stable is just for servers that need 99.9% uptime
honestly, you’d be better off using sid rather than testing, since it’s rolling release
as for gimp, they can just use pinning to upgrade gimp exclusively. they can also use backports. no need to upgrade the whole system
Gimp 3 is scheduled to be released in May, around the time that Debian 13 is about to come out. Given that Gimp is never on time, and that Debian will only include stable software in their repo, you won’t see Gimp 3.x on Debian for another 2.5 years (the next major release).
However, don’t fret. There’s a way to run Gimp 3, even now, without overwriting the 2.10.x version of Gimp that comes with Debian: https://github.com/ivan-hc/GIMP-appimage/releases That’s how I run gimp 3 on my Debian too, I just download the 3.0-rc1 .appimage file, make it executable, and it’s up and running.
Flatpack is one of the official ways to install the RC:
If you have Flatpack on your system, go to https://www.gimp.org/downloads/devel/ and click the GNU/Linux option, there will be a button to install it.
If the button doesn’t work, the page says:
Flatpak additional instructions
If the link above doesn’t open your software installer, install with following command:
flatpak install --user https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.gimp.GIMP.flatpakrefRun with following command line:
flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP//betaTo update:
flatpak updateNote: If you installed both the stable and beta repositories, the desktop (menus, etc.) will see only one version at a time. To make sure your desktop sees the development version, run this command:
flatpak make-current --user org.gimp.GIMP betaOr respectively to restore the stable version as the visible GIMP application:
flatpak make-current --user org.gimp.GIMP stableYou may also create shortcuts running specifically one of the other version.
I don’t like flatpaks. Some builds don’t support printing, for example. Same for snaps. That’s why I always prefer appimage from these types of binaries, but my favorite always remains the repo versions.
