I’m giving App Center and snaps a chance. The Mate24.04 installer seems horribly broken when attempting multi-boot installations. I had to use gparted to free up space and copy the installation from an earlier mSATA ssd trial install and fix things with grub-customerizer and Boot Repair afterwards.
Now that I’ve got it booted, I noticed that the App Center window goes nuts with lots of weird break-ups of the graphics as installations are proceeding, the surrounding desktop stays stable. I noticed this on my first couple of installations, but these were pretty minimal setups so I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. Quite annoying and certainly would not inspire confidence in a new user. The issues I had trying to preserve an old Windows10 partition would also be a very bad experience for someone trying Linux as an alternative to buying a “Windows 11 ready” system.
I’ve installed Gimp 3 and its OpenVINO plug-ins as snaps. I’ll follow-up good or bad as I see if these snap versions are usable or not.
But my initial Gimp 3 snap experience is very poor – couldn’t read a USB stick with source files, permission denied. So I copied the files to my home directory and opened one. Never having used the OpenVINO plugins before I found its entry under the layers menu and click it nothing happens. Went back and selected it and tried the F1 for help option.
F1 help: local files not installed, the read on-line option fails with a really unhelpful error message about missing GIO backends or perhaps need to install GVFS. Very negative initial experience!
I’m beginning to see why many people want a “snap free system” if crap like this from poor packaging is typical. Do the people making these snaps not actually use them and are thus oblivious to such obvious problems?
At this point I’d vote for the App Center to just go away as being more trouble than it is worth. Appalling to me how many things there have “poor” ratings.
Having to manually setup permissions for certain filesystems is a weird quirk of snap; e.g. the USB issue.
On the one hand it's nice from a sandbox or security perspective but, on the other hand, most users don't want those extra steps for an ordinary use-case.
I hope that the next Ubuntu-MATE will use Calamares as installer, or something else that works. Even a ncurses installer would be good, as long as it works™.
I had so many problems with GIMP 3 installed via snaps and flatpak as all of my scripting no longer worked. I just went back to 2.1. Ubuntu packages have not caught up with the latest GIMP so I would just hold off on 3.
Gimp3 and the OpenVINO plugins, especially “super resolution”, was my main motivation for giving these App Center 24.04 snaps a try. I’d already tried and uninstalled the Kodi and VLC snap packages, but as low as my expectations were, these limbo’d right under the bar!
I really see the need for something like flatpak, snap, appImage, docker, etc. so that often changing libraries don’t force whole system upgrades (which usually are not obvious improvements), but by far my best experiences have been with AppImage, specifically Balena Etcher, Kdenlive, and Shotcut to name the three I depend on the most.
I’d vote to just pick one of these and make it “just work” and deep-six the rest!
Thanks! I will investigate, but under the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” rule, the current repo 22.04 Gimp deb packages meet all my current needs.
My only interest in Gimp3 at present is the OpenVINO AI plugins, specifically “super resolution”. I’ve played with Super Resolution in some Google Colab tutorials and see potential in it. Using it on the zoomed detection images from my security camera system add-on is on my ToDo list, but having a plug-in to try really piques my interest as in our later years lots of old family photos are resurfacing and fixing them up to redistribute to the family is a labor of love.
If the AppImage gimp3 can install the plugin (or even better has it!) I’ll be all over it. Of the lot, I’ve had by far the best results from AppImage “portable” packages.
I do have one AppImage, a notable one at at that: FreeCAD!
Everything else is a Debian package, either "massaged" by Ubuntu ... or original package from Debian.
But when you must cross that bridge, and it is currently at the bottom of the gorge, you need a workable alternative! You can either build it (i.e. compile from scratch; I don't recommend that if under duress) ... or ... call in the crew with a ready-built bridge to slide across the chasm ... to get you where you need to go! That's how I see an AppImage.
Edit: Just remembered that I have a few tarballs that I installed (under /opt ) directly from GitHub releases:
I use scripts a lot and the python and script-fu did not work for me as ubuntu packages had not caught up yet, regardless of how I installed it. So until the scripts work, I am forced to stay with 2.10. Which is not a bad thing.
I agree. I used Pinta for years because it was a bit simpler than Krita, but the last time I installed it had become unusable in my opinion. I uninstalled it almost immediately.
I tried the AppImage GIMP3 package on 22.04 and it seems to work fine and couldn’t be easier to “install”, although I haven’t tried printing. But I’ve no idea how to add or activate the OpenVINO Super Resolution plug-in to an AppImage, no clues emerged in a quick search.
The ppa version doesn’t seem to have the OpenVINO plug-ins available, and again I didn’t find any clear instructions on how to add and activate them.
Following some links posted in this thread, I found this info:
To install the GIMP 3.0 snap along with the OpenVINO AI plugins, use the following commands:
sudo snap install gimp --channel preview/stable
sudo snap install openvino-toolkit-2404 --beta
sudo snap install openvino-ai-plugins-gimp --beta
A bit out of date, but I went into the App Center again and searched for OpenVINO and sure enough the openvino-toolkit snap was there but not installed!
I installed it and now the plugin appears to run, still got some learning curve to figure it out, and see if it is beneficial enough for me to move to GIMP3, but it was the point of this endeavor. Given the hassle of getting my monitor/printer calibrated to give good results, unless GIMP3 pulled a Microsoft and made the xcf format for 3.0 not compatible with the previous version, editing in GIMP3 and printing from GIMP2 is a viable workflow for me given that I don’t do a high volume of prints.
Seems the App Center missed a dependency, as installing the openvion-ai plugins should have also pulled in the openvino-toolkit snap as a dependency.
So file this issue as the fault of the App Center and not the fault of snap packaging.
I probably need to move to the openvino plugin github for answers , but just thought I’d share this one last thing.
The GIMP3 unsharp masking tool seems much improved. So with the appImage GIMP3 I installed on 22.04 I was able to “improve focus” enough to make a good image from the photo I wanted to try the Super Resolution on. Pleasant surprise was I got a great print first time with my Epson XP-15000 with no futzing around, the appImage could just use my printer as is. So appImage remains the “best” of these “portable installs” in my experience.
The openvino super resolution plug-in ran once with the default, but didn’t seem to do anything that image size doesn’t do (i.e. no apparent improvement in “sharpness”) when bumping the image from 2000x3000 to 4000x6000 except run a whole lot slower. Changing any of the parmeters causes an “inference failed” message telling me to “check the logs”. Does anyone have a clue where these snaps put their “log files”? Poking around the snap directory I couldn’t find anything remotely useful.
My goal was not to increase resolution, my hope was it would be a better version of “Un-sharp Masking” tool. The plugin only seems to allow integer values for the parameter, and when I tried “1” it crashed the entire GIMP3 snap after running for quite a while. After it ran successfully, is when I saw that the output layer produced seemed to be nothing more than an image size adjustment.
Yep, but GIMP sharpens by increasing contrast in the images edges. As you increase size, you increase pixels. Sharpening as you go “may” provide you with the improvement you are looking for. At the end of the day, sharpness is all related to your lens so you may only be able to sharpen an image so much.
As I said, the GIMP3 USM tool seems much improved and I produced very acceptable prints for the family after using it. This was an old family photo taken in the early days of color photography. I was able to get the color balance nicely restored in the scanner software (Vuescan, commercial package that supports Linux), but the image was apparently from one of those “Brownie” fixed focus (at the so called hyper focus distance) cameras where everything from about 4 feet to infinity is “in focus” (or equally out of focus is more like it).
The family members are thrilled by the result so score a nice success for the GIMP3 appImage on 22.04. Since I didn’t need to do anyhing but use my printer I can seamlessly move to GIMP3 from my current GIMP2 deb without hassle thanks to the appImage.
I’ve gotten a response from the GIMP3 snap github issue I raised, and will try his suggestions first before trying your journalctl suggestion,
A bit of followup about the App Center Gimp3 and OpenVINO AI plug-ins.
Still no solution for getting esrgan to run , but the appImage seems to be an easy way to get or try GIMP3 if you don’t need any extra plug-ins, and I got a great print without needing to change anything.
We did identify an issue with either the snap or the App Center version of it (are they the same?), specifically the user has to be a member of the “render” group for the OpenVINO plug-in to work, unfortunately fixing this didn’t fix my problem.
I see a lot of comments about security and trust involving appImage vs snap, docker, flatpak, & deb. Seems to me you have to trust the download source for all of them, and deb and snap need root privilege to install (never tried flatpak and don’t remember if I had to sudo anything for the docker I tried circa 2016). With the appImage it is just download and make executable and it doesn’t need root. Of course “metasploit” like privilege escalation could be built into any of them, that is where it is in a practical sense impossible to get around the need to trust your download sources.
Running “journalctl -u snap.gimp.gimp3” gave: – No entries –
Starting the GIMP3 snap in a termainal window gives this, maybe someone can see a clue here that I don’t:
~$ gimp
[OpenVINO AI Plugins for GIMP]: Installing super resolution and semantic segmentation models to /home/ai/.local/share/openvino-ai-plugins-gimp and config to /home/ai/snap/gimp/common
Gtk-Message: 11:32:19.709: Failed to load module "appmenu-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 11:32:19.710: Not loading module "atk-bridge": The functionality is provided by GTK natively. Please try to not load it.
set device 'ELECOM ELECOM TrackBall Mouse' to mode: disabled
set device 'Virtual core XTEST pointer' to mode: disabled
(gimp:2791): IBUS-WARNING **: 11:32:24.573: Failed to mkdir /home/ai/snap/gimp/531/.config/ibus/bus: Not a directory
Gtk-Message: 11:32:39.840: Failed to load module "appmenu-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 11:32:39.840: Not loading module "atk-bridge": The functionality is provided by GTK natively. Please try to not load it.
bps: 8
Image dimensions: 2344 x 3576.
load_contiguous
bytes_per_pixel: 3, format: 3
Gtk-Message: 11:33:07.010: Failed to load module "appmenu-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 11:33:07.010: Not loading module "atk-bridge": The functionality is provided by GTK natively. Please try to not load it.
(superresolution-ov:3040): IBUS-WARNING **: 11:33:07.461: Failed to mkdir /home/ai/snap/gimp/531/.config/ibus/bus: Not a directory
Running SR async
async SR done
run superres complete
Gtk-Message: 11:37:13.760: Failed to load module "appmenu-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 11:37:13.760: Not loading module "atk-bridge": The functionality is provided by GTK natively. Please try to not load it.
(superresolution-ov:3216): IBUS-WARNING **: 11:37:14.202: Failed to mkdir /home/ai/snap/gimp/531/.config/ibus/bus: Not a directory
Running SR async
async SR done
run superres complete
I am not that well versed to really break down your challenges completely, but I will fall back on my experience with GIMP and snap and that is to say it never worked right for me. So if I go with this idea, then perhaps even if ESRGAN is selected correctly in OpenVINO, it might fall back to CPU because Snap can't access the right directory.
But I am only guessing. Otherwise, your output shows SR is running correctly in OpenVINO so not sure what else it could be, but I will be interested to see what happens. Good luck, dude!
