Great to see that the next stage in GIMP is here, as the lack of a good warp tool had frustrated me some time ago. Looks like an upgrade is in order. While I’m at it, time to upgrade Blender, as there’s a bug fix that reportedly affects rigging attachments, and I may be playing with that soon.

UPDATE: this is the next development release, available for download. I upgraded to the current stable release, 2.8.16.

New and Improved Tools
All tools in GIMP are now GEGL-based and fully functional in up to 32bit per color channel precision mode.

GIMP 2.9.2 also introduced two new tools that we consider mostly complete:

Unified Transform, designed by Peter Sikking and implemented by Mikael Magnusson, combines rotation, scaling, skewing, and adjusting perspective in a single tool.
Warp Transform, implemented by Michael Muré, replaces the old iWarp plugin and provides its features in a tool that works directly on images, without a preview window.

via GIMP 2.9.2 Released – GIMP.