GIMP 2.8.18 Released, Mint 18 Upgrade, Leap 42.2 Tidbits

After yesterday's 2.9.4 release, Wilbur today announced GIMP 2.8.18. This stable release addresses security and other bugs since 2.8.16. In other news the Mint project announced their 17.3 to 18 upgrade procedure and Douglas DeMaio reported on the latest changes to Tumbleweed.

GIMP 2.8.18 was announced today to address a fairly obscure security vulnerability as well as several crashes and other bugs. Some fixes include:

- Initialize fontconfig cache in separate thread to keep GUI responsive on first startup
- Properly recognize layer masks as deactivated, e.g. for moving layers
- Create $XDG_DATA_HOME if it doesn't exist
- Pulsing progress bar in splash screen to indicate unknown durations
- Fix unbolding of bold font on edit
- Fix progress bar for file-compressor

Downloads are in the usual place or wait for your distro's package.

Clement Lefebvre, founder of Mint, today announced the upgrade path for Cinnamon and MATE editions of Mint 17.3. As usual, users are discouraged from actually upgrading and encouraged to try Mint 18 Live to see if any hardware regressions stand out. The instructions are to be carried out at the commandline rather than package manager this time due to the "base jump" and the extra complexity that comes with that.

Douglas DeMaio posted a Tumbleweed update today saying a lot has happened since his last report. He said one major update was python3-setuptools to version 24.0.2 as well as LibreOffice 5.2, Mesa 12.0, Linux 4.6.3 and PulseAudio 9.0. Plasma 5.7 is still in testing but will be added eventually. DeMaio also said Leap 42.2 will bring GNOME 3.20, Plasma 5.6.4 and Linux 4.4. An alpha is scheduled for this month with a beta planned for August. Release candidates are projected for October with the final landing sometime in first week of November.