software

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. But at the time of release, it made a pretty good stab at replicating a lot of the features you'd have in the 1996-era Photoshop. GIMP 0.54 did include a clone stamp, though which at the time was the height of sophistication in photo retouching.

Active development of what we've seen called the "GNU IMP" has resumed in recent years. In 2024, we reported that after 21 years, version 3 was close and then, in May last year, that GIMP 3.0 was out. The team has not slackened since. GIMP 3.2 came out in March 2026, and as we write, the most recent version is GIMP 3.2.4 from mid-April.

What is interesting about the new Flatpak, though, is that this isn't the modern GIMP: this is the original public release of GIMP, brought back to life. The GIMP homepage has a section called A Brief (and Ancient) History of GIMP. This describes how this original version used the Motif toolkit: "It had a dependency on Motif for its GUI toolkit, which made efficient distribution to a lot of users impossible. This restriction also alienated a lot of would-be plug-in development."

Back then, Motif was the default graphical programming toolkit for developing GUI apps on X11. One of the problems, though, was that Motif was not FOSS. It was not released under a recognized FOSS license until 2012, shortly after the Common Desktop Environment was open-sourced, as this vulture reported at the time, back when he still had a lot more hair on his cranium.

The next GIMP release was version 0.60, and that had a very significant change: "Peter [Mattis, co-creator] got really fed up with Motif. So he decided to write his own. He called them gtk and gdk, for the Gimp Tool Kit, and the Gimp Drawing Kit. Peter tells us now that they never intended for it to become a general-purpose toolkit – they just wanted something to use with GIMP, and it 'seemed like a good idea at the time.'"

The Motif-based GIMP looks a little strange and clunky by modern standards. It reminds us slightly of WordPerfect 8 for Linux, which we wrote about in 2022 – 24 years after a very young Register told readers it was coming.

Even though Motif is FOSS now, we don't expect anyone will start using it again for new projects. However, running GIMP 0.54 today gives an interesting glimpse into an alternate Unix universe.

Because Motif wasn't FOSS, the year after GIMP appeared, the founders of the GNOME desktop chose GTK instead, noting the issues with KDE's Qt: "The KDE project – in its current form – has about 89,000 lines of code, on the other hand, the source code for the Qt library has about 91,000 lines. Qt also forces the programmer to write his code in C++ or Python. GTK can be used in C, Scheme, Python, C++, Objective-C and Perl."

GTK has been developed alongside GNOME ever since. It's now up to GTK 4, which GNOME would prefer you not to theme, although the Linux Mint project is trying to support that anyway. Others are expressing discontent with its limitations in other ways: we recently covered the announcement of a new fork of GTK 2.

There are other alternatives. GTK 1 is still around. Robin Rowe, the developer of the TrapC type-safe dialect of C, also maintains CinePaint, and to do so, he also maintains a fork of GTK 1, which you can find on GitLab. Other old GUI toolkits are also adapting to the new world of HiDPI and Wayland. In 2024, we reported on Tcl/Tk 9, 12 years after the last point release, and the following month, on a new release of FLTK after 13 years. ®