GIMP 3.2.6 lands on Linux with KDE fixes, 28 CVEs, and SDK tooling
The GIMP Team's new stable release patches 28 security findings, cleans up KDE Breeze leaks, and gives plugin devs an official SDK for AppImage builds.
GIMP 3.2.6 is here. The GIMP Team announced the stable release on September 10, 2026, and Linux users get a version that's significantly tighter on security and much friendlier to the KDE desktop environment. There are 28 CVEs patched, a new SDK for plugin developers, and a whole pile of polish for those running Plasma.
28 CVEs patched
That's a big security haul for a maintenance release. Jacob Boerema and Alx Sa handled the bulk of the security work, working through findings from modern detection tools across GIMP's massive set of imported file formats.
The patch list runs from CVE-2026-18301 to CVE-2026-82343, plus ZDI-CAN-29400 from the Zero Day Initiative. Researchers from Securin Disclose and others helped surface the issues. If you handle untrusted raster files regularly, updating now makes sense. The attack surface GIMP presents is large, and these patches close a lot of it.
KDE gets the love Linux users have been asking for
The KDE desktop gets a serious lift in this build. Bruno Lopes and the team fixed dialog decorations on KDE so they now use Server-side Decorations instead of the GNOME-style client-side decorations that used to show up. Buttons now sit at the bottom of dialogs where they belong, not stuck in a header bar.
There's also work on KDE Breeze theme leaks. Several system theme elements were bleeding through the UI, causing graphical glitches. The patches clamp that down. Pop-up windows now respect z-ordering correctly, which fixes issues where resource selection or metadata editors would hide behind parent dialogs.
It's the kind of polish Linux users actually feel daily. The UI behaves how it should instead of fighting the desktop theme.
GIMP SDK extends to AppImage
Developers building plugins or GEGL filters can finally use the GIMP SDK on any official package. Bruno Lopes extended the SDK support to AppImage, Windows, and macOS builds. You can use gimptool to build against bundled headers and libraries. The SDK weighs in at about 20 MB.
This removes the previous reliance on Flatpak or Snap for development workflows. If you were building plugins in a container before, you can now target the native AppImage directly. The gimptool command handles the heavy lifting.
GTK4 prep and other fixes
The team is inching toward GTK4, though a full port is still a ways off. Ondřej Míchal and Jehan swapped deprecated gtk_widget_show() calls for gtk_widget_set_visible(). Direct GdkEvent access is being replaced by getter functions. The window cursor flags are getting explicit gdk_window_set_cursor() calls. It's incremental work, but it keeps the codebase healthy.
If you're compiling on an s390x system, you've got a fix too. Pranav P cleared a build freeze on IBM mainframes.
A few UX wins landed for Linux users as well. Layer group cutting now works across all rasterized, unlocked layers at once, thanks to Cheesequake. Font loading got faster thanks to work by balooii, which helps startup time and the Text Tool. Jehan added barrel rotation dynamics for the Wacom Art Pen and Art Pen 2, so your brush can react to how you rotate the stylus.
What's next and where to grab it
The development team has already shifted focus to the GIMP 3.4 series. Nightly builds are available as "GIMP 3.3.2." The big tease is a new zipped-XML project file format to replace XCF, which has been binary since 1997. XCF will continue to be supported for reading.
GIMP 3.2.6 is available now for Linux via AppImage (x86_64, ARM64), Flatpak (Flathub), and Snap (Snap Store). Downloads and SHA256 hashes are on the GIMP downloads page.
