Blast from the past as GIMP 0.54 is revived in Flatpak form
Retro-computing fun for the nostalgic with first (and last) release to use Motif instead of GTK
Development of GIMP has picked up speed in recent years, but now its first public release is back as a Flatpak, allowing the 1996 version to run on modern x86-64 Linux distros, even under Wayland, without the nightmare of finding and installing its 30-year-old dependencies.
If you are just looking for a quick and lightweight image editor – especially if you want modern features such as edge detection or generative fill – this is not the package for you. It's mainly for the software archaeologists.
For example, 0.54 did have basic "deep etching" capabilities, where you can isolate an element from its background, but you'd have to use destructive techniques – i.e. there were no fripperies like layers or layer masks, where you could preserve the badness in case you made a mistake....
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