There are still about four months to go until the release of the next version of Ubuntu, but Canonical uses the Daily Build for something. They are daily images that include new features regarding those released the day before, but if we decide to install one of them on a computer, either virtually or natively, the operating system will be updated with the latest news. And one of them will have been received if we had installed a package manually, since the image editor GIMP has been updated to version 3.0.
To be more specific, the change itself has been that, throughout this week, the GIMP package has moved from the previous 2.10 series to offer GIMP 3.0 RC1. A second Release Candidate has been available for just under 24 hours, so it is a matter of hours before it is updated again. As is usual in Ubuntu and most Linux distributions, Canonical's system has a few official repositories where many packages are uploaded, and it is to these repositories that GIMP 3.0 RC1 has arrived.
GIMP 3.0 is expected in early 2025
GIMP 2.0 was released in March 2004, and v2.10, the last one that we could consider major or at least somewhat more than medium, was released in April 2018. With this in mind, it seems that the trend indicates that major releases of the popular image editor arrive in the spring, but this time it could be a little earlier. Its developers have not given an estimated arrival date, but it is known that GIMP 2.10 arrived after the second Release Candidate, so We could be a month or a month and a half away from the stable version. Or not.
RC2 arrived about six weeks after the first one, and if they do release another one, GIMP 3.0 would arrive again around spring. In any case, Canonical has decided to get ahead of the game and include the candidates so that in the future we can use the stable version of the next big release.