GIMP is a free image editing software for Linux, but also Windows if you are unwilling to pay for Adobe Photoshop or other image editing programs. A problem for GIMP has been that it is very single-threaded, but this will change in the future.
GIMP is a popular alternative among enthusiasts that does not want to use shareware for image editing. While GIMP is something many knows about, it may now have been acknowledged among photo artists and the professional sector, where Photoshop dominates.
Two of the problems has been that the program can only use one processor core and the long time between stable releases. There has been talk about changing the core of GIMP to GEGL and it is now ready to talk about the transition, and that it is time to accelerate the program with more multi-core support and make use of the power of the GPU.
It talks about accelerating the development of GIMP by reducing the amount of new features between versions. The coming GIMP 2.8 will not support rendering and GPU calculations since it is too long into the development stage to add this. With 2.10 it will implement and improve GIMP, prepare more for GEGL, but also clean up and remove unnecessary framework (API) in the program.
But with GIMP 3.0 it will have made a full transition to GEGL as the new core of the program. GEGL is a programming library for image editing that is under development by GIMP. With this GIMP will also get support for multiple cores, and use the power of the GPU.
