On GIMP's 20th birthday (Nov 22), a new version of the free and open source image editor was released: 2.8.16. This is a bugfix release from the 2.8 stable series and it includes the following changes:

A week ago, the Xubuntu team members were asked to vote if Xubuntu 15.10 should drop GIMP, Abiword and Gnumeric and include LibreOffice by default.

GIMP 2.8.14 was released yesterday, bringing various bug fixes and small enhancements. This is the stable GIMP branch and no new features are added in the 2.8.x releases, just bug fixes.

Update: the Ubuntu / Linux Mint PPA now has GIMP 2.8.14: "Yesterday's 2.8.12 release had broken library versioning, so we had to roll out GIMP 2.8.14 today. The only change is the fixed libtool versioning".

G'MIC (GREYC's Magic for Image Computing) is a framework for image processing that comes with a large number of pre-defined image filters and effects (almost 400, with an extra 300 testing filters). There are several interfaces for G'MIC: a command line tool, a web service, a Qt based interface for real-time webcam manipulation, a library and a GIMP plugin.

To help those who are used to Photoshop, +Martin Owens has created a collection of GIMP 2.8 tweaks that make it more like Adobe Photoshop.

Thorsten Stettin has created a new PPA for Ubuntu / Linux Mint users who want to use the latest GIMP 2.9 development builds.

There won't be a GIMP 2.9 stable release - 2.9 is used for development and will result in the next stable GIMP version, 2.10.

The major new feature in GIMP 2.10 will be a complete port to GEGL / high bit depths and the latest GIMP from GIT already allows working in 16bit and 32bit per color channel mode, both integer and float:

Quick tip: You can get XCF thumbnails in Nautilus by using GNOME XCF Thumbnailer. However, the tool needs a fix to work with the latest Nautilus 3.x. This should also work with Nemo, the default Cinnamon file manager.