I know, I know… The GIMP is far better on GNOME, where it belongs, but I use macOS for my job and I still want it on my devices: I use Inkscape for SVGs as well. Big fan of Adobe, not so fan of its prices, then I don’t use its products if my company doesn’t provide them to me. Spoiler, it doesn’t.
Again, I’m a full-stack web developer, so my use of GIMP for a living is limited, but I still need to crop, resize, and export images whenever I work on the front-end side of a project. Sometimes I also use it for image optimizations. Being on macOS, installing GIMP is easy, but it doesn’t integrate with the UI as it does with GNOME.
No matter if it’s Linux or BSD, but for sure having it installed with GNOME makes more sense, since above all it’s GNOME default image editor: of course, GIMP over the years became more than it, but it has many things in common with the desktop environment, starting from the GTK libraries, and Adwaita.
That’s why a couple of months ago some macOS advanced GIMP users discovered that the UI turned blank with the latest stable release. It seems that the same issue was already found earlier, but I didn’t know anything about it, since the Tahoe upgrade. Yes, now I’m only using stable software on my devices.
This is funny, if you know me, because I used to live on the edge, installing alpha operating systems and applications. But this doesn’t have much to do with the topic. Long story short, stable GIMP doesn’t work with macOS Tahoe: and I don’t think they will fix it, so you must opt for a different solution.
Luckily, a solution do exist and it’s called GIMP 3.1.4, the latest development release: by replacing a stable install with this new one, you’ll come back using it without issues. It fixes the empty UI as seen in version 3.0.4, but it’s an unstable version, and then it can have other problems I don’t know yet.
I don’t know if we’ll wait for the next stable release to have the UI fixed, or we we’ll have it with the 3.1.x version only. I can just ensure that I got GIMP working again by installing the 3.1.4: to date, it’s the only way of solving the problem. Did you find a different solution? Let me know in the comments.
I really love GIMP and I think I’ll go on using it with every operating system. I used to have it installed on Windows as well, where it often had similar problems with the GTK toolkit. Adwaita, that I mentioned, is the GNOME 3.x design system, indeed. So the best setup would be on Linux.
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