In just 4 months since GIMP 2.10 was released, we have now seen 4 major patches (yeah, the versioning could use some work… 
) that have brought rapid improvement to the open source raster art package. The 2.10.6 release brings several new features including vertical text layers, two new filters, improved straightening and more.
Details from the news file:
Core: - Render drawable previews asynchronously. - Merge the file view filter and file format lists in GimpFileDialog. The presence of 2 lists was very confusing. Filters: - New "Little Planet" (gegl:stereographic-projection) filter. Tools: - Halt the Measure tool after straightening. - Add an "orientation" option to the measure tool, corresponding to the "orientation" property of GimpToolCompass (i.e., it controls the orientation against which the angle is measured, when not in 3- point mode.) The orientation is "auto" by default, so that the angle is always <= 45 deg. Note that the "orientation" option affects the tool's "straighten" function, so that the layer is rotated toward the current orientation. - Text layers can now represent vertical texts, with 4 variants: left-to-right and right-to-left lines, and forcing all characters to be upright or following Unicode's vertical orientation property. See also: * https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr50/ * http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/VerticalOrientation.txt User Interface: - The Dashboard dockable dialog now has an "async" field to the dashboard's "misc" group, showing the number of async operations currently in the "running" state. - New Preferences option to enable/disable layer-group previews, since these can get quite time-expensive. Translations: - New language: Marathi - 9 translations were updated: Brazilian Portuguese, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish.
You can learn a great deal more about this release in the release notes available here.