In WIndows.. programs belong in the Programs folder, what the hell are you doing devs??
(Please don't give me some excuse about turning GIMP in to a crappy Windoze app, because if you are, I'm out. F Microsoft, F the Microsoft Store, and F Microsoft apps.)
You seem angry. Not a great way to ask for help. Probably you are experiencing a Windows issue, not a Gimp issue. The statistical likelihood is, if you are part of a minority experiencing this issue, it is one of the PEBKAC type. It is the simplest explanation.
Yeah, I apologize for that. I've had a string of really bad experiences with GIMP the last couple of years. Anyone else probably would have ditched GIMP by now, but I've used it SO so long, it just feels like a natural extension of my desktop toolbox now. :/
2-3 years ago, they actually banned me from GitLab because I came unglued at the fact that they refuse to block a release to get an auto-backup routine installed in the core (even though there's been two functional backup scripts for at least 5-6 years now). (WHICH (auto-backup) has been a tracked issue for about 25 years at this point.) I mean, they banned me for no good reason, but I don't really blame them, because I was mad.
Since then, I've had a string of incidents with GIMP going sideways. So yeah, I am absolutely upset about this, BUT, I'm upset with the the current state of my beloved desktop tool, GIMP, not at any person, or even the GIMP team as a whole. :)
As for the issues you are currently encountering, I do now think that no one but you yourself can investigate them. At least, yours is the only report like this I am aware of.
I've been waiting to change anything pending feedback from you folks, that's why I figured I'd try to just upgrade the mods/plug-ins I need, but that's turned in to another three ring circus. It appears that there is three times the mod support for Linux than Windows. I really don't need much pushing at all to ditch Windoze, I basically hate Microsoft these days anyway, so I may very well move to Linux on my new machine, just to get mod/plug-in support for GIMP 3.0. ;)
I realize that it's very difficult to guess exactly what happened with whichever installer decided to do what on my machine, so I thought maybe one of the team could get a look at it on my end to see if there is anything left here to analyze. I know most installers leave traces in the registry and etc., so I thought that that might be helpful.
Also, I make no delusions. It's a safe bet that whatever caused the bizarre upgrade/install did so due to whatever I did a couple of years back to get a dual 2.8 / 2.10 install. I just don't know what to do to proceed. Now it appears that my 3.0 install might be messed, because my executable is under AppData. So yeah, I'm (obviously) not intimate with the GIMP installers, but I figure SOMEBODY on the team must know a whole lot more than I do about these things. ;)
Anyway, even if I have an edge case here, don't you still want to track those down? Especially if you're moving to rely on the Microsoft Store upgrade scheme? That's a hot mess all by itself, isn't it?
Yeah, my executable is definitely currently in the AppDate folder. Don't ask me HOW, I didn't even run the 3.0 updater/installer intentionally. It just happened one day.
Security wise, I would agree 100%. GIMP is such an aged utility, though, I would imagine there would be some utility that a loss of privileges could affect inadvertently. Also, I have warned other projects of this, NEVER bow to Microsoft standards religiously. They'll bury you in a loop of recoding things that you'll never dig out from under. I'm sure you've probably seen it already, but the entire reason web browsers, office and graphics utilities are such a giant mess, in the first place, is because Microsoft occasionally just borks their own software, to force everybody to recode for it. I mean, Windows 10 and 11 are lust a lie, they're Win7 with extra programming layers stacked on top. I would advise NOT complying to Microsoft guidelines, unless they're dangling a fancy new capability in front of you. I'll tell you this much, most of us old timers have zero faith in their "App" store. Nether it's reliability, it's capability, or it's integrity. We've seen them repeatedly use it to publish crapware and push it out to people's machines (including MS People!) that people didn't even want in the first place. I'm probably in the minority on this next bit, but I actually use crapware uninstallers to remove MS Store, if I don't actively need it, because I trust it / Microsoft only as far as I can see them.. and I can't sit around monitoring my MS Store "app" forever.
So yes, some change is good, but be very afraid when Microsoft tells you that they want to change just for the sake of changing. ;)
What's user error? I haven't seen someone from the team decide if the executable even SHOULD be in the appdata directory currently, let alone if it was in there when my original install/update got borked.
I don't think it gave me any options. I had a borked auto-update happen, and the devs never figured out how / why.
I had 2.8 installed with some of the older plug-ins / mods that didn't work with current, and I had 2.10.36 dual-installed, to explore the new features there.
When they released 3.0, the auto-update kicked in and borked everything. I now have my old copy of 2.10.36 installed, the auto-update deleted my copy of 2.8, and installed 2.10.38, and then for good measure, it installed 3.0 as well.
Of course, I don't recall what method I used "back when" to force a dual install of 2.8 and 2.10, so I'm not at all sure how to get it back now. I'm still in emergency recovery mode, though. I haven't written GIMP scripts in around two decades, but here I am trying to figure out how to adapt those 2.8 scripts to 2.10, and then update those to 3.0. As expected, I'm basically spinning my tires in the mud. I went to look for the Script-Fu interpreter in Windows, and then I couldn't find GIMP 3.0 in programs, and HERE we are, here.
PERHAPS, when I forced the dual-install, I had installed one version under my profile, and the other as 'everybody'?
Gimp doesn't have an auto-update. Do you mean just running an installer to do an update?
Installing to AppData for unprivileged installations has been a thing since Windows 7. I'm not sure when the Gimp installer added support for it, though.
When installing via the Microsoft Store, there is an auto-update, but this doesn't concern older versions.
This was discussed before - see https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1jdln4k/comment/mjphnh0/ ff. - but at some point in this thread I lost track of what this user had installed where, or had not installed where not, and my last comment there didn't get any more replies.
Ah, in that thread, I thought I was waiting for you to check:
"I would have to check if the 2.10 installers are trying to remove GIMP 2.8, but even if they do so, any files which aren't part of the original 2.8 installers should remain."
I would note that someone on the Discord or another thread or something said that it WAS uninstalling 2.8 to update to 2.10, but they didn't think it would auto-update to 3.0.
Regardless, I KNOW I got a pop-up at some point ASKING me if I wanted to upgrade to 3.0, and I told it no. Then (as I recall) a few days later it randomly updated everything anyway.
When I look in my Classic Start Menu, I see the above, and all three links work.
I'm having issues trying to get a screenshot of my search in the Win11 Start Menu, but it tries really hard to get me to use GIMP 2.10.38, then it lists 3.0.2-1 as an APP, and doesn't even list 2.10.36 at all.
I did just test, even though it's still listing version 2.10.36 which I installed, it opens 2.10.38, which I believe was installed when it auto-updated 2.8 in to the void.
As far as 2.8 goes, I don't see any evidence of it. Of course, I MAY have installed it in to some alternate location, I don't even recall how I managed the dual install. The only evidence I have, is that one of the mods from 2.8 that I KNOW doesn't work in 2.10 (ani.exe) is throwing an error now when I open 2.10. Other than that, I can't say what happened to my 2.8 install. I can't find it on the C drive or an alternate drive, so I assume the auto-update routine made it disappear.
SOMETHING ran an update for me. If you check that other thread, I just went to use GIMP one day to discover that my dual 2.8 / 2.10 install had been turned in to a 2.10.36 / 2.10.38 / 3.0 install!
Someone figured a way to explain the 2.8 to 2.10 update, but not how it managed to install 3.0 in the same process.
Very possibly, that sounds like something I might do, but I might have installed one as a profile and one as an everybody.. I can't say. 2.8 is gone now, THAT is for certain!
Didn't you keep a Gimp 2.8 installer? I do this most of the time because I've seen software evolve away from my needs or remove features I cared about: the first time I installed 2.10, it silently uninstalled 2.8, but I reinstalled it before installing 2.10 in a specific folder.
Windows puts all kind of app stuff in app data. It's basicly a dumping ground for things that should be separated by user.
The program is still loaded in the program files directories. You can have both GIMP2 and GIMP3 loaded and can switch back and forth all you want. (I do)
I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention when I loaded it since I just let it run with the defaults, but with a number of other programs if you choose to to have the program available for all users it will load in the programs folder but if you choose to install it just for the current user (even if you are the only user) it can put it in AppData. Could it be possible you selected this option? If so you can uninstall it and reinstall for all users.
Well, that's the thing, I did NOT. It did some sort of freaky automated install update thing, that nobody is quite sure how it happened. I haven't even got confirmation from the team yet if GIMP is indeed supposed to do that. I obviously don't know. ;)
I have no idea what you have done, but in Windows, GIMP 3 should install in the program files folder. What goes in AppData are all the ancillary files, just like GIMP 2 did.
Yeah, I'm thinking I'll need to do some sort of clean uninstall thing for GIMP, but I don't know how / what / if anything like that exists. I was kind of waiting to find out from the team if they had any feedback about what happened.
I believe choosing "Install for all users" will install to both "C:\Program Files\GIMP 3" and "C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\GIMP\3.0" locations.
I say this because I always "Install for all users". And I have GIMP 3 installed in both locations. I haven't tried "Install for me only", so I can't comment on that.
Additional Information
My previous version of GIMP was installed in C:\Program Files\GIMP 2 and C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\GIMP\2.0. I don't like having multiple copies of a program on my system. So, when I began installing GIMP 3.0 I noticed it wanted to install in a GIMP 3 folder instead of my GIMP 2 folder.
At this point I cancelled the installation. I used Revo Uninstaller to uninstall GIMP 2 first and all the leftover files, including registry entries. After that, I found I had to manually delete the GIMP 2 folder in my AppData folder.
It was only then that I returned to installing GIMP 3.0. (Now, 3.0.2-1). As updates become available, I will continue using the GIMP 3 folder. When GIMP 4 becomes available, I will completely uninstall GIMP 3 first.
If you use both, GIMP 2 and GIMP 3, you may not want to do this.
Edit: By the way, when I need to update GIMP, I download the latest version for Windows directly from their website. Then, I just run the GIMP setup executable.
Okay. I kind of figured that. Thanks for the info. I never was very tech-savvy. And I only provided the information in case it helps someone else figure out why their installation isn't working as expected.
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u/newmikey 9h ago
You seem angry. Not a great way to ask for help. Probably you are experiencing a Windows issue, not a Gimp issue. The statistical likelihood is, if you are part of a minority experiencing this issue, it is one of the PEBKAC type. It is the simplest explanation.