This was discussed in developers’ chat and the agreement seems to be that this can be remedied by introducing a small variation of the user interface theme. With GTK3-based version, you simply don’t see as much of the content that you can preview on the canvas.Īnd if you look at the height of the sliders, it’s really not as good as what you know from the stable series on a HiDPI display.

…and here it is from the stable branch based on GTK2. To give you more idea, here is the window of the Convolution Matrix filter from the unstable branch… Users with touch displays might disagree with me though. It’s probably okay for simple desktop applications but it’s just horrible for cases like GIMP where these buttons occupy the space that would be otherwise used for showing more of the actual content. This will be evident, for example, in the updated slider widget where you get minus and plus buttons right next to the slider. I also don’t really like numeric controls in GTK3. Toolbox icons are not tiny, brush previews are not tiny and so on.Īlthough, right now all I have here is a smaller HiDPI display, 2560 by 1440 pixels, and everything looks kinda huge to me, even with fractional scaling. If you have a FullHD laptop and an external HiDPI display and you use GIMP on both of them, you should be fine as well.

Simply put, if you have a 4K display, you should be fine now. The most important difference is that the unstable version of GIMP handles HiDPI displays vastly better because the support is built right into the user interface toolkit and thus there is no need to add ugly hacks. The new unstable series is based on a newer version of the user interface toolkit called GTK. This is partially true and partially false. So let’s talk about major differences.įor some reason, there’s a popular opinion that GTK3, the user interface toolkit, is going to right many wrongs for GIMP in terms of user interface. GIMP 2.99.2 has been released and it actually comes with changes that are not available in the stable series which is 2.10. Here is my obligatory disclaimer that I’m affiliated with the GIMP project, so you should take anything I say about it with a grain of salt.

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