G'MIC + GIMP and Snap in 20.04

snap
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Everything works well when I use a PPA for GIMP in 18.04. Now that I have upgraded to 20.04, I chose to install GIMP from Ubuntu Software. Which people say is a Snap.

I use GIMP and G’MIC. Looks like the snap GIMP in 20.04 does not support G’MIC. I asked G’MIC on possible workarounds and they said they don’t know and better ask the people who build packages ( for GIMP ? ). I believe that is here and this is a valid question.

I am sure that a lot of people who use Ubuntu rely on GIMP and G’MIC. Any help will be great. Thanks.

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ping @lucyllewy who maintains the GIMP snap AFAIK

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I was told that there was an issue with Python plugins as well, which work fine in 18.04. Thanks for the ping @ijohnson

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Hi,

The problem is that I can’t account for every possible third-party application or plugin ahead of time to bundle them into the snap. If I were to add GMIC then that opens the door to constantly be adding more stuff making the snap bigger for everyone even if they aren’t necessarily using all the features. The correct solution to this will be to investigate the possibility of using the content interface to package addons into additional snaps, but this is difficult and may not work correctly anyway…

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Thanks for the response @lucyllewy

G’MIC is very important for artists who use GIMP. I don’t use it much myself, but a lot of people will tell you how inseparable they are.

I was told that there is a gimp_gmic_qt plugin available. I think that won’t help when we use the snap package.

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G’MIC is not really “one of the every possible third-party plug-in” for GIMP.
It’s one of the top three in the list of the most used plug-ins. Maybe including the 5 or 6 most popular plug-ins in the GIMP snap wouldn’t hurt that much and would please a lot of people ?

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Who decides which 5 or 6 to include? why must it stop at 5 or 6? why did you ignore my request to add “Bob’s image thingy”, too?

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Would it be possible to add plugins into SNAP_USER_COMMON?

For Arduino, I made it possible for users add new themes and install plugins. I did this by pointing Arduino to use SNAP_USER_COMMON as plugin and theme dir.

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There are already many people who have tried to make a selection of the most popular plug-ins, and surprisingly it’s always the same plug-ins that are found to be useful.
There aren’t so many major plug-ins for GIMP that you can’t make a reasonable selection.
See pages below.



https://www.lifewire.com/best-gimp-plugins-4770023
https://www.viralhax.com/gimp-plugins/
https://tech4fresher.com/best-gimp-plugins-and-filters/

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This is weird. I have successfully installed https://github.com/kritiksoman/GIMP-ML on Ubuntu 20.04 and GIMP from the snap package.

Note that GIMP-ML applies machine learning (uses pytorch) and uses your GPU to perform the tasks.

Works beautifully with the snap package of GIMP.

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G’MiC is a Qt based plugin, that’s why it can’t work « inside » Gimp as a snap → the snap package of Gimp provides no Qt library ( rather understandable since it’s not a Qt app but GTK ).

Is there a way to « connect » snap Gimp to the needed Qt libraries ? That may solve the issue ?

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This one’s probably based on most up-to-date python and involves no Qt.

Older Gimp plugins ( hear : not ported to python 3 ) won’t work in Ubuntu 20.04 as it no longer ships python 2. Not related to snap.

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There are GNOME runtimes for snap packages. If only there was a Qt runtime.

$ snap list | grep gnome-3
gnome-3-26-1604             3.26.0.20200529             100    latest/stable/…  canonical*          -
gnome-3-28-1804             3.28.0-17-gde3d74c.de3d74c  128    latest/stable    canonical*          -
gnome-3-34-1804             0+git.3009fc7               36     latest/stable    canonical*          -
$

I had a look at compiling Qt statically. I could not compile it, and resources from the Internet hinted that it should not be possible license-wise. If this was possible both technically, and license-wise, then it would be possible G’MIC as a plugin.

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Ok sounds like a won’t fix situation :wink: if it’s both difficult, technically and license-wise.

Then is there any chance G’mic Qt plugin being ported to a full gtk plugin ?

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  1. Visit https://snapcraft.io/gimp You will notice the link to the snapcraft.yaml build file on this page.
  2. Use the snapcraft.yaml file to build again the GIMP snap package. Try to build a working snap package that you can test on your system.
  3. Add Qt support to snapcraft.yaml. You can borrow the specific lines from some Qt app snapcraft.yaml file.
  4. Build. Now, if you put g’mic in the plugins folder, it should work because in the context of the snap package, the Qt libraries can now be found.

Once you get them all working, you can publish this new gimp snap package as, for example, gimp-coeurnoir or gimp-qt.

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Thanks for the recipe !

From G’MiC on twitter :

The 1st version of the plug-in was in GTK (and poorly written). It has been entirely recoded from scratch in a clean way by S. Fourey, who was fluent with Qt. That’s the main reason.
Rewriting a GTK version of the plug-in is not planed and would represent a huge amount of work.

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There are runtimes for GNOME. I do not know if there is a runtime for Qt. If there is such a runtime, then the gimp snap package could just include it.

Otherwise, it would be easy to create a separate GIMP snap package that just has additional the Qt libraries. Technically it is easy, and you can also use the Snap Build service. Perhaps someone that reads this and is affected, can give it a go. Should not be that difficult to do.