First, let me say I am not techy. I installed gimp and am using it to scale photo's (I paint art). I also convert to Black and White. For some reason every time I go into artistic waterpixels it freezes, I opt to wait for the system to respond and 8 minutes later I can move a choice a few digits and it freezes again. I have removed gimp, reinstalled gimp, disconnected from the internet, etc, etc. This seems to be the only option to date that this happens to and of course its the one I need. Can anyone help me in non techy terms?
How big is the image? The filter seems to be CPU-intensive and very sensitive to image size. On my rather powerful PC, it doesn't see very usable on everything bigger than a thousand pixels.
I think part of the problem is GEGL updating the display as the parameters are adjusted.
I wonder if this works for you
Select a small representative area of the larger image.
Edit -> Paste as a new Image
Apply water pixels to that small image, with your settings
Back to the large image and use Filters -> Repeat Last to the image.
The display is not updated until the filter is complete
This with a 4896 x 3264 photo
https://i.imgur.com/yn2DaEZ.mp4
might work.