Gimp Macbook M1

Gimp Apple M1
Gimp Macbook M1

Ever since I read Kay Singh’s Apple Silicon M1: Black. Magic. Fuckery article, I couldn’t stop wanting one. My 2012 MacBook Air was in need of a replacement, and although still very serviceable for a 8+year old laptop, not upgrading OSX and a shortened battery lifespan were getting irritating. So, Santa (well, you know) bought me a M1 2020 MacBook Air. At first, I wanted to hold off for a while, after many of the developer tools I use were officially supporting ARM64. But hey, what the heck.

In this video we will install Gimp on a Mac Air M1 with Big Sur and make sure it works with Rosetta 2. Support status for new Apple silicon M1 macs. Additional info: It is not all well on the platform yet, though - with users upgrading to the latest macOS release, Big Sur, we started getting reports about performance and user interface issues.

As there’s not a lot of information out there on the M1 from a developers perspective, except a fewother blogs here and there, I wanted to chime in and share my initial findings. Bear in mind that this will very likely change in the near future, as many developers are starting to support the new architecture. An interesting site to check whether your software works is isapplesiliconready.com and doesitarm.com - although these are not always up to date and sometimes provides false information! Be sure to go after the source yourself.

In App News this week, we’ll check out the latest release of Blender and celebrate 25 Years of GIMP. Linus Torvalds commented on using Linux on Apple’s new M1 Mac and we’ll round the show out with a new product from Pine64, a soldering iron, and there has been a. With M1 it's additionally total architecture change, so that requires not only a dev with access to mac but also with actual physical M1 HW. The best bet to make sure m1 is supported is to either become dev yourself if you have M1 HW or to gift a dev with M1 hw:) That makes sure the dev in question is interested AND invested in supporting M1. Ever since I read Kay Singh’s Apple Silicon M1: Black. Fuckery article, I couldn’t stop wanting one. My 2012 MacBook Air was in need of a replacement, and although still very serviceable for a 8+year old laptop, not upgrading OSX and a shortened battery lifespan were getting irritating. So, Santa (well, you know) bought me a M1 2020 MacBook Air. At first, I wanted to hold off for a.

Whatever you do, be sure to upgrade Big Sur to 11.1 first - that will take a while (and eat up more HDD space). I went with the 512GB Air version with eight cores. I don’t care about CPU throttling - even with the 25% performance hit, it still outperforms heavyweight Intel MacBook Pros!

Productivity tools

Before getting to the programming part, let’s take a look at the basic tools I couldn’t live without. First, install iTerm 2. It’s already M1-ready, and Big Sur moved from Bash to Zsh, another good shell I still know from my Gentoo days. Check out technofob.com’s oh-my-zsh config for colors and such, and maybe add extras in your ~.zsh.

Now that you have a shell, we need cmdline stuff. The master branch of Homebrew is ARM64-complaint and you can install two homebrews for the bottles that are still lagging behind - or compile them from source using brew install --build-from-source. I’ve successfully built these from source: sqlite, openssh, python3.9, imagemagick. I set up the M1 homebrew version in /opt/homebrew - and so far, every installation didn’t need a Rosetta alternative - yet. (Heads up: unrar is gone! See link for alternate formula.)

A few other critical pieces of software:

Already running native:

The Brave nightly build. Most Chromium-based browsers work.
Rectangle, the upgraded Spectacle one.
Alfred - of course! I became a convert after fiddling with it, replacing Spotlight and Clipy (see below).

Still on Rosetta - but development on the way:

Clipy clipboard utility, the upgraded ClipMenu one.
Hopefully Opera someday soon.
Sublime Text 3. Preview builds of Visual Studio code are already released.
Evernote. It runs on Electron, a known-to-be CPU hungry JS shell. The Rosetta one works, but is a bit sluggish and uses a significant amount of battery.
Update jan. 2021: The latest GIMP 2.10 is finally released for OSX, but there are known Big Sur issues. I didn’t run into a single one.

Update 12 jan. 2021: Sublime Build Systems still use /bin/bash to execute the exec_cmd or cmd commands. This means that your $PATH will be screwed up. There are a couple of options to mitigate this. Fiddling with the internal exec.py file did not work for me. In the end, I simply re-created a .bash_profile file in my home dir to set the path for Sublime Text 3 builds. Using Terminus does not help.

Spotify is a mess, according to some, while others claim that Rosetta is “good enough”. I’d like to run as much stuff as possible native, I guess we’ll have to wait. For now, “it just works”, but as Evernote, is far from optimized.

Java development

The Azul community released ARM64 Java builds that are blazingly fast. There are other solutions, but the Zulu builds I tested so far are great. They even ported the JDK13/JDK11/JDK8 older ones. I settled for v15, since Gradle does not like Java 16 yet, according to the compatibility matrix. Gradle 6.7 builds fine with the ARM64 development kit.

The biggest hurdle for me was JavaFX, the UI libraries we use to teach students the Model-View-Controller principle. It reportedly works under Rosetta, but I wanted to try it native anyway, and got a nice no toolkit found exception, not unlike this one. Funnily enough, it builds fine, but it does not execute: JavaFX looks for a native UI renderer and cannot find one.

Installing JDKs with different architectures turned out not to be problematic, and I can quickly switch between both using an alias:

Paths shouldn’t be hardcoded, but /usr/libexec/java_home -a didn’t work for me. Building this sample FXML project using ./gradlew clean build took about a second natively:

ARM64: 1378ms
x86_64 Rosetta2: 9646ms! (second time: 2459ms, still almost double)
x86_64 MacBook Air 2012: 14590ms (second time: 3200ms)

As you can see, combining Rosetta with another “Virtual” Machine is not a particularly great idea. Remember that the 2012 MacBook Air only has 4GB of memory, with eight year old tech.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans: 12.2 includes Big Sur/Rosetta2 support, but is not running natively. It auto-detects the JDK ARM64 build, which is even more annoying, as setting the default Java Platform is a pain. The “best” way is to manually override netbeans_jdkhome in netbeans.conf. Compared to IntelliJ, NetBeans truly is a piece of shit. Of course, the x86_64 setting also slows down NetBeans itself, not only the project you wish to compile/run.

IntelliJ IDE

IntelliJ: 2020.3 ARM64 test builds are available. It seems that the Rust debugger is not hitting the breakpoints. There’s also a preview PHPStorm build, although I haven’t tried it yet. After opening a Gradle 6.3 project, IntelliJ complains about an invalid Gradle configuration, claiming that JDK15 isn’t compatible with this version of Gradle, although it builds fine on cmdline. Fixing the distribution URL in gradle-wrapper.properties to 6.7.1 does the trick:

After that, the Azul JDK combined with the IntelliJ preview build is a snappy experience and pleasant to work with. Debugging works fine, just as a few third-party libraries I tried - as long as you stay away from JavaFX.

.NET Development

I still need to try this with Rider and Mono. Khalid Abuhakmeh wrote about his experience in a jetbrains blogpost, concluding that it was pleasant to work with .NET on the M1. Bear in mind that he’s talking about Rosetta.

C/C++/Cross-compiling

First, get Xcode from the App Store. Yoink, 12GB!

Next, the CLion IDE: the debugger cannot be launched, official ARM support is currently not there yet, but they’re working on it (last update: 25th of December). One of the perks of being an early adopter, I guess… I don’t want to try this in Rosetta as I only need CLion every odd semester for my teaching activities, and hopefully, by then it’ll be okay.

Until then, I’ll compile and debug cmdline. CMake works flawlessly, using the master version of brew: > Pouring cmake-3.19.2.arm64_big_sur.bottle.tar.gz. Using it to compile the 1.10 release of Google Test gives C++11 errors so you’ll have to add a -DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=17 flag to CMake as per this ticket. Compiling itself was extremely quick, compared to what I’m used to on my 2012 MacBook Air.

Game Boy Advance

Cross-compiling GBA stuff using pacman worked flawlessly, obviously in Rosetta mode. I doubt it will ever be released natively. Cross-compiling the whole gba-sprite-library, including four demo projects, took 15343ms. I was surprised that this worked without any problems, and a Rosetta-enabled mGBA happily plays my binaries! On the 2012 laptop, it takes more than twice that long: 32950ms.

Arduino

After finding not so promising Reddit posts, I had to try it out myself. A Github issue tells us Rosetta is supported and “somewhere in the future” native support should be coming - Linux ARM64 builds are already available.

After installing the Arduino IDE (which runs on a JRE, by the way), right-clicking and pressing “Get Info” reveals Kind: Application (Intel). It boots up fairly slowly, but compiling and uploading work without problems. Performance is a non-issue here, you won’t be compiling megabytes of C code anyway.

JavaScript

Node 15.5.0 and its package manager have native bottles uploaded in the master Homebrew repository. Everything works flawlessly after a brew install npm. Do yourself a favor and install a Chromium-based browser to check out Lighthouse.

Go

It’s been a while since I programmed in Go, but Dids created a gist entitled “Compile Go for Apple Silicon (M1)', where he explains how to compile Go natively. I have yet to try it out.

Python

Although python 3.8 comes included with Big Sur, python 3.9 compiled without any issues from source using Homebrew. However, since OSX always seems to come with an annoyingly old 2.7 version, you have to create a symlink in /usr/local/bin to set the default version to 3.9. You may also need to re-link Python:

Writing

Hugo extended works like a charm on ARM64. Pfew!

As for my needed LaTeX tools: the MacTeX about ARM page tells me that full native support will arrive in spring 2021. Until then, Rosetta to the rescue (it also requires 6.7GB…). I do hope that switching will not be problematic, as I can’t wait until then.

As for pandoc that converts my Markdown to LaTeX, compiling from source downloads the x86_64 version of the GHC Haskell compiler. As expected, compilation crashed:

So, I reverted to the x86 installer pkg, which seems to work fine. After the necessary installations, I re-compiled a recently accepted ICSE paper (involving make, pandoc, panflute, pdflatex, bibtex, yaddayadda), and it took 7700ms on the 2012 Air, while the Rosetta x86_64 version took 4447ms. Consider me happy! It will be very interesting to see this number further reduced in spring 2021.

Virtualization

The universal memory structure of the M1 architecture has its advantages, but these obviously fade when dual booting. Furthermore, using something like VirtualBox gets you into further trouble by evenly splitting RAM. It looks like VirtualBox support will never be coming as it requires a x86 CPU.

Alternative options are Parallels, which has a technical preview already published, and VMWare Fusion, which announced on Twitter that they’re working on it.

As of now, there is no possibility for me to run my virtual image of Linux for the Operating Systems course I’m teaching. I guess I’ll be using a Dell laptop for this purpose… I don’t mind, my 2012 MacBook Air didn’t have the required memory to comfortably work with it anyway, so I already resorted to another machine.

Edit 25 jan. 20121: Eleanor pointed me towards a gist to get qemu running on M1. This means it is possible to run Windows 10 and Ubuntu Server on your ARM Mac! On performance: A simple factorial program in ghci is noticeably faster on Ubuntu (ARM64) via qemu than on MacOS via Rosetta. Follow Sevarg’s recent guide to get Ubuntu running under QEmu!

So… Is it worth it?

It depends. If you’re like me, and you have been waiting for a long time to upgrade, now is the best possible time to take the plunge. However, if you already own a more recent MacBook (I hope it’s with a decent keyboard: this one types lovely, compared to my wife’s 2017 butterfly keyboard on the MacBook Pro - what a train-wreck), it might be a better idea to wait half a year.

Currently, with the software I daily use, about 50% of them are running under Rosetta. It is impressive nonetheless: it is seamless and still very fast - except if you’re a Java developer and somehow have to support JavaFX. Don’t forget that the M1 chip comes with other awesome perks:

18h battery life (more like 10+ with regular compile jobs, but still great)
Greatly improved screen compared to my 2012 laptop
I finally bought a QUERTY one.
8GB is more than 4GB.
We used the 2020 Air to video-call (using browser-based Jitsi) over Christmas, while we used the 2012 Air during Christmas Eve - the fan went on and it crashed once.
The instant-on effect is amazing, compared to waiting up to ten seconds.
I can finally play Baldur’s Gate III!

Like Kay said: Black. Magic. Fuckery!

Current Stable Version

The current stable release of GIMP is 2.10.24 (2021-03-28).

Pssst... want to check out the GIMP 2.99.4 development release?
Get it on our development downloads page.

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GIMP for Unix-like systems

If available, the official package from your Unix-like distribution is the recommended method of installing GIMP!

The flatpak build is new and has known limitations, though it will likely provide faster updates, following GIMP releases closely.
Therefore choose your installation medium according to your needs.

Flatpak build available in: x86-64 and AArch64 (note: i386 and ARM-32 versions used to be published, yet are now stuck at GIMP 2.10.14 and 2.10.22 respectively).

Flatpak additional instructions

The flatpak link above should open your software installer and prompt you to install GIMP. Yet it may not work out-of-the-box on some platforms since the flatpak technology is new. If that is the case, ensure flatpak is installed and if clicking the link still does not prompt to install GIMP, then manually install by command line:

flatpak install https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gimp.GIMP.flatpakref

Once installed, it will be made available exactly the same way as other applications (menus, desktop overview, or any specific application launch process used by your desktop).
If this is not the case, we suggest to report a bug to your desktop or distribution asking for proper support of flatpak. In the meantime, you can still run it by command line (not as the recommended method, only a workaround):

flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP//stable

This installation will also provide regular update. You don't have to come back on this page and install again (it will not work!) when a new version of GIMP is released. Instead if your distribution and/or desktop has a good support for flatpak, it should propose to perform updates.
Once again, if your distribution does not have proper support, you can always fall back to using the following command line:

flatpak update

Systems without flatpak support

GIMP can also run on Solaris and is available for the BSD family of systems such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

Please refer to the documentation for your Unix-like system on the installation of software.

GIMP for macOS

Note: the currently available package provides GIMP 2.10.22 and has not yet updated to the latest version, GIMP 2.10.24. We're working on that, please check back later.

Updated on 2021-01-31: GIMP 2.10.22 DMG revision 3
Performance improvements on Big Sur and on previous macOS versions

The download links above will attempt to download GIMP from one of our trusted mirror servers. If the mirrors do not work or you would rather download directly from our server, you can get the direct download here.

Supported OS: macOS 10.9 Mavericks or over

Since the 2.8.2 version, GIMP runs on OSX natively. No X11 environment is required.

Native build

The official GIMP 2.10 DMG installer (linked above) is a stock GIMP build without any add-ons. Just open the downloaded DMG and drag and drop GIMP into your 'Applications' folder.

The SHA256 hash sum for gimp-2.10.22-x86_64-3.dmg is: 844dc06731cbd8ccaa6ffd4e0c74ad49ed1ecb6ae65db71988102acb6c219d56

Check it on VirusTotal: gimp-2.10.22-x86_64-3.dmg

Older Downloads

Gimp Apple M1

Previous installers for OSX can be found here: download.gimp.org.

Macports

An easy way to compile and install GIMP and other great Free software on your Mac is by using Macports. The installer allows you to choose from a large directory of packages. To install gimp using Macports, you simply do sudo port install gimp once you have Macports installed.

Last we checked, the GIMP port file pointed to the current stable release and we have reports from people who've built GIMP successfully this way.

Homebrew

Homebrew is similar to Macports and provides packages (aka formulas) to install, either by compiling them from source or by using pre-made binaries. There are indications that there is now a formula for GIMP, installable with: brew tap homebrew/cask && brew install --cask gimp.

NOTE! Please be aware that it was announced recently that Homebrew is using analytics. To turn this off in homebrew then run: brew analytics off
You can read more about this on Brew Analytics.

Fink

Fink is a package repository that offer mostly precompiled binaries. It provides the apt-get command known to e.g. Debian and Ubuntu users, and installing GIMP is as easy as sudo apt-get install gimp once you have installed the Fink installer.
If there's no binary package, then fink install gimp will compile GIMP from source.

Disclaimer: we haven't been able to determine if it is possible to install or build recent GIMP from Fink. Last we checked, GIMP 2.6.12 appears to be the most recent GIMP package that is offered there.

GIMP for Windows

Updated on 2021-04-07: GIMP 2.10.24 installer revision 3
Backported GLib fix for very slow file dialogs (issue #913) and custom GTK2 fix for non-functional Wacom Airbrush finger wheel (issue #6394).

Supported OS: Windows 7 or over

These links download the official GIMP installer for Windows (~200 MB). The installer contains both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of GIMP, and will automatically use the appropriate one.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing system. It works by downloading GIMP from a distributed network of BitTorrent users, and may improve download speed dramatically. Choosing this option will download the torrent file for the GIMP installer. You may need to install a torrent client to make use of this file. Learn more...

Hash Sum

The SHA256 hash sum for gimp-2.10.24-setup-3.exe is: 5e9eabe5739523a9fc347b4614d919418f3335e7aab082a65f71705421e85e04

Gimp Macbook M1

Check it on VirusTotal: gimp-2.10.24-setup-3.exe

Older Downloads

Previous v2.10 installers for Windows can be found here: download.gimp.org.
Previous v2.8 installers for Windows can be found here: download.gimp.org.

GIMP User Manual

These links download language-specific Windows installers for GIMP's local help. By default, they will place the help files with your GIMP installation.

Note: GIMP uses online help by default. If you want to use this local help offline, you will need to change GIMP's help settings.

In GIMP, select [Edit] > [Preferences] > [Help System]
For 'User manual', select 'Use a locally installed copy'
Under 'Help Browser', you can choose between your system's web browser and GIMP's help browser plugin (if available).

See the online help for more settings.

Chinese Simplified (39 MB)
Catalan (40 MB)
Danish (39 MB)
Dutch (39 MB)
English (39 MB)
English (United Kingdom) (39 MB)
Finnish (39 MB)
French (41 MB)
German (41 MB)
Greek (38 MB)
Italian (43 MB)
Japanese (39 MB)
Korean (40 MB)
Norwegian Nynorsk (35 MB)
Portuguese Brazilian (40 MB)
Romanian (39 MB)
Russian (40 MB)
Spanish (40 MB)

Source for version 2.10 (Stable)

GIMP releases available from gimp.org and its mirrors contain the source code and have to be compiled in order to be installed on your system.

For instructions, how to build GIMP from source code, please see this page.

GIMP 2.10.24 is now available at https://download.gimp.org/mirror/pub/gimp/v2.10/. You may want to read the Release Notes for GIMP 2.10.

To allow you to check the integrity of the tarballs, here are the hashes of the latest releases:

gimp-2.10.24.tar.bz2 (sha256):: bd1bb762368c0dd3175cf05006812dd676949c3707e21f4e6857435cb435989e
gimp-2.10.22.tar.bz2 (sha256):: 2db84b57f3778d80b3466d7c21a21d22e315c7b062de2883cbaaeda9a0f618bb
gimp-2.10.20.tar.bz2 (sha256):: e12f9f874b1a007c4277b60aa81e0b67330be7e6153e5749ead839b902fc7b3c
gimp-2.10.18.tar.bz2 (sha256):: 65bfe111e8eebffd3dde3016ccb507f9948d2663d9497cb438d9bb609e11d716
gimp-2.10.16.tar.bz2 (sha256):: cbf9fe9534b913a9487b00cd9710cbc569bfd71fdd2f8c321547701a7d70cbeb
gimp-2.10.14.tar.bz2 (sha256):: df9b0f11c2078eea1de3ebc66529a5d3854c5e28636cd25a8dd077bd9d6ddc54
gimp-2.10.12.tar.bz2 (sha256):: 7d80b58e0784120d57d327294f6a1fda281ff51a61935c2cd764da281acaac71
gimp-2.10.10.tar.bz2 (sha256):: 12d1f243265c7aee1f2c6e97883a5c90ddc0b19b4346cf822e24adbb6c998c77
gimp-2.10.8.tar.bz2 (sha256):: d849c1cf35244938ae82e521b92b720ab48b8e9ed092d5de92c2464ef5244b9b
gimp-2.10.6.tar.bz2 (sha256):: 4ec8071f828e918384cf7bc7d1219210467c84655123f802bc55a8bf2415101f
gimp-2.10.4.tar.bz2 (sha256):: ffb0768de14a2631b3d7ed71f283731441a1b48461766c23f0574dce0706f192
gimp-2.10.2.tar.bz2 (sha256):: 1cb0baaecdefe44d371a15f2739a1bcbce4682336b4ccf8eb7b587ce52c333eb
gimp-2.10.0.tar.bz2 (sha256):: 7fcc96fb88cb0a0595d2610f63a15dec245bb37bf9db527d37a24fb75e547de2

GIMP help files are available at https://download.gimp.org/mirror/pub/gimp/help/.

Please consider using one of the mirrors listed below.

Development snapshots

We now have a separate page for development versions of GIMP.

Want to check out the GIMP 2.99.4 development release?
Get it on our development downloads page.

FTP and Web Mirrors

We had a server move a while back that caused us to lose our existing mirrors (moved from physical to virtual server and to an environment that doesn't allow FTP access). On the plus side, we are now able to offer rsync access to download.gimp.org.

If you are running one of the existing GIMP mirrors, or want to create a new one, please contact us to get your rsync credentials.

Denmark: https://mirrors.dotsrc.org/gimp/gimp/; ftp://mirrors.dotsrc.org/gimp/; rsync://mirrors.dotsrc.org/gimp/
Finland: https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.gimp.org/; ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.gimp.org/; rsync://rsync.nic.funet.fi/ftp/pub/mirrors/ftp.gimp.org/
France: http://ftp.iut-bm.univ-fcomte.fr/gimp/; ftp://ftp.iut-bm.univ-fcomte.fr/gimp/; rsync://ftp.iut-bm.univ-fcomte.fr/gimp/; https://gimp.ip-connect.info/gimp/; rsync://gimp.ip-connect.info/gimp/; ftp://gimp.ip-connect.info/mirror/gimp/
Germany: https://ftp.fau.de/gimp/gimp/; ftp://ftp.fau.de/gimp/gimp/; rsync://ftp.fau.de/gimp/; https://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/misc/grafik/gimp/; ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/misc/grafik/gimp/; https://artfiles.org/gimp.org/pub/gimp/
Greece: https://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/gimp/; ftp://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/gimp/
Japan: http://www.ring.gr.jp/pub/graphics/gimp/
Netherlands: https://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/gimp/gimp/; ftp://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/gimp/gimp/
Philippines: http://mirror.rise.ph/gimp/; ftp://mirror.rise.ph/gimp/
Poland: https://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/graphics/gimp/; ftp://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/graphics/gimp/; rsync://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/graphics/gimp/; gopher://ftp.icm.edu.pl/1/pub/graphics/gimp/
Sweden: https://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/gimp/; ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/gimp; rsync://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/gimp
Ukraine: https://mirror.klaus-uwe.me/gimp/gimp/; ftp://mirror.klaus-uwe.me/gimp/; rsync://mirror.klaus-uwe.me/gimp/
United Kingdom: https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/; ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/; rsync://rsync.mirrorservice.org/ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/; https://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/gimp.org/pub/gimp/; ftp://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/gimp.org/pub/gimp/; rsync://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/gimp.org/pub/gimp/
United States: https://mirror.jaleco.com/gimp/gimp/; https://mirror.umd.edu/gimp/gimp/; http://gimp.cp-dev.com/; ftp://devhost.cp-dev.com/gimp; rsync://gimp.cp-dev.com/gimp; https://mirrors.syringanetworks.net/gimp/gimp/; ftp://mirrors.syringanetworks.net/gimp/; rsync://mirrors.syringanetworks.net/gimp/; https://mirrors.xmission.com/gimp/gimp/; ftp://mirrors.xmission.com/gimp/gimp/