Some popular tools are missing in GIMP 2.10 in Ubuntu 20.04

I am a new user trying to switch from Windows to Linux. I have Ubuntu 20.04 with GIMP 2.10.22 installed. I have also installed the gimp-plugin-registry. But the 'Heal Selection' tool is missing from Filters-Enhance menu. I really need it to work. Please help.

This question is about the "Heal selection tool" (found in the Resynthesizer plugin, The one that works like Photoshop's "Content Aware Fill") not the standard Heal tool, which the current answer is about.

Solution 1:

Standard Heal Tool

It is certainly there in Gimp 2.10.22 (which I installed from ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/gimp), maybe it does not show up because the toolbars are grouped by default.

Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Interface -> Toolbox and uncheck Use tool groups.

screenshot showing Appearance options in Toolbox menu

Before and After

few tools many tools

Note: The other answer is about Heal selection tool, which OP originally wanted to enable.

Solution 2:

Heal Selection tool

This answer is based on research by @Levente, who insisted I add it to a new answer instead of editing their.

The heal selection tool depends on certain packages which are not available in Ubuntu due to gtk2 being removed, but they can be grabbed from Debian Buster.

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/p/pygtk/python-gtk2_2.24.0-5.1+b1_amd64.deb
wget https://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gimp/gimp-python_2.10.8-2_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./python-gtk2_2.24.0-5.1+b1_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./gimp-python_2.10.8-2_amd64.deb
sudo apt install gimp-plugin-registry

I verified that this brings back Heal Selection tool under Filter -> Enhance in Gimp 2.10.22 (ppa version) in Ubuntu 20.04.

Some background

Someone explains how they obtained the Resynthesizer Plugin in Ubuntu 18.04

They mention a gimp-python package as dependency for the "Enhance > Heal Selection" menu entry.

This person reports to have located and installed it (on 20.04) from the official repositories. But the download links posted by this person shows 404 error. However, Debian still hosts these packages.

It seems that this may be due to GTK2 being deprecated. Luckily GIMP will soon move to GTK3.