GIMP now on Windows for ARM (experimental)

2023-08-13
by Jehan

As architecture platform usage widens, Windows on ARM (64-bit) is now a thing. So we decided to support experimentally GIMP for Windows on ARM!

With the newly published revision 2, our universal installer of GIMP 2.10.34 for Windows (as found on our downloads page) will auto-detect the running platform and install the ARM build when relevant.

Thanks in particular to our Windows packager, Jernej Simončič, for his continuous work!

Future work

The “experimental” qualificative for this new support is for the following reasons:

  1. It is not as widely tested. We are aware of some issues already and hope that releasing this experimental build will help us get more feedback.
  2. Only Jernej has a machine with Windows on ARM so far. In particular none of the developers have such hardware, as far as we know. So we don’t expect to be able to fix issues for Windows/ARM as fast as for other supported platforms.
  3. Last, but not least, this additional build is not set up yet in our continuous integration platform, which means we cannot discover appearing issues as thoroughly and quickly as for other architectures, nor can we automatize builds as transparently as we wish.

How you can help

Aside from reports and patches, we really need to set up a Windows/ARM machine in our continuous integration platform. Indeed this is considered a blocker and may be cause for abandoning the experimentation when we release GIMP 3 since we don’t want to backtrack and get back to manual builds done by a single contributor on their personal machine for the 3.0 series.

This means that we are looking for anyone willing to help us set up a machine with Windows on ARM and configure it as a runner on our Gitlab project.

Because of obvious security requirements, such a volunteer would need to have sysadmin experience, willing to commit themselves in the long run (let’s not leave a Windows machine with holes on the internet) and have had some experience in FLOSS contributions.

It might also be interesting to coordinate with other cross-platform Free Software projects to share the administration burden of a CI runner which we can use together to build for Windows/ARM.

If you are interested, please get in touch on IRC or in the dedicated report.