How to update GIMP in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS without using Flatpak or Snap

GIMP is for me a special application, which I use almost daily -for little things in general, but that’s another story- and that I like to keep updated, although it has not been easy for me in the last year … because for this specific case , neither Flatpak nor Snap meet what I need.

My needs, of course, are what they are: I mainly use distributions based on the latest Ubuntu LTS that has come out and I use several of the plugins that are still packaged in the Ubuntu repositories. This is the basics, and since Ubuntu does not update applications like GIMP in the same version, and that versions such as Ubuntu LTS last for me installed for more or less a couple of years, the price to pay is to miss all the news that GIMP is implementing, which for a while now has accelerated its development and we leaves releases as interesting as the recent GIMP 2.10.24.

The simplest solution is to pull Flatpak or Snap, whose authenticity is not to replace the software packaged “natively” for any distribution, but to be able to access applications that for whatever reason are not available in ordinary repositories, or are not available. update as they should, see the case at hand. However, the Flatpak or Snap versions of GIMP, although they are kept up to date, present various problems of integration with the environment, adding the mentioned plugins or other extensions is more complicated … For me, it is not a good solution, despite being the most immediate.

What have you been doing up to now? Pull from PPA, of course. But the maintainer of the most popular one who had left it and it was not until recently that I found out that there is another that has taken over, that has been at it for a while and updates the packages quickly and that is also recommended by the previous. So I share it here, in case anyone is interested. The PPA repository is maintained by the author of the UbuntuHandbook site and the installation method is the usual one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/gimp

sudo apt install gimp

What is the advantage it gives me? Being able to have the latest version of GIMP in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and derivatives with full compatibility with the plugins available in the Ubuntu repositories. With that I am satisfied.