Gimp is 25 years old today • Hacker News Board

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#91

Post by gaius_baltar » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 7:41 AM UTC

neolog wrote: post #19

CharlesW wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between it's derogatory and sexual definitions, I can't realistically use an app called "GIMP" at work even if I was personally comfortable with it. If you're in a similar position, try Glimpse. https://glimpse-editor.github.io/

> I can't realistically use an app called "GIMP" at work even if I was personally comfortable with it. What kind of work do you do?

> > I can't realistically use an app called "GIMP" at work even if I was personally comfortable with it.

> What kind of work do you do?

I would assume that the parent poster works with a bunch of high schoollers and other folks that can't understand the concept of a word having several meanings -- specially when acronyms are involved.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#92

Post by tsjq » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 7:42 AM UTC

megameter wrote: post #73

jes5199 wrote: post #14

GIMP is such a strange tool. I actually have used it, semi-frequently - since the 90s! The overall experience of using it has only changed a little in that time. And it gets the job done. I guess that makes it successful! What else has been so stable? But of all the software I have ever used, GIMP is the most difficult to learn. I memorized a few tutorials, this must have been around Y2K, to do the a couple things. A…

The way I would put it is: GIMP has features, not workflow. There are a lot of things that are possible, but not by combining the basic tools and metaphors in sensible ways: each time is more like diving into the command line options of a GNU tool, finding the exact thing, and if you really, really need to automate it, it goes in a script where it can be safely forgotten. Which is, certainly, a way of doing, but not…

>The way I would put it is: GIMP has features, not workflow.

very well said. totally agree with this

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#93

Post by mongol » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 7:42 AM UTC

manaskarekar wrote: post #7

GIMP has been one of my constantly used software for over 20 years. I recall messing with text effects and some Python-fu. Still use it to this day for all kinds of editing. And it gave us GTK! Congrats.

This deserves to be higher. It spawned GTK, which spawned Gnome and so on. In this way, it is one of the most influential open source software programs around. I recall also that in it's youth, it showed what is possible, it staked out a future. There were not many as advanced GUI programs around like it then, but xv was of course the go-to program in the graphics category.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#94

Post by Phlogistique » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 7:45 AM UTC

fctorial wrote: post #83

dau wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they should invite the Blender people over to fix the UI for them :-)

Blender uses a home grown ui toolkit.

Technically, Gimp too[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK#History

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#95

Post by interfixus » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 7:46 AM UTC

Always surprising to see the amount of ire that GIMP can reliably call forward in threads like this. I've used the thing privately and professionally for countless projects since 1997. Stuff for websites, photo material for several books, restauration work for museums and photo archives, colorizations, weirdo manipulations and just general fun. Have ventured into other software but always come back to GIMP, very quickly so in the case of Photoshop and its various equally useless Adobe siblings.

Yes, GIMP is clunky, and the gradual unclunking mostly seems to happen in geological timeframes, and there's the CMYK problem and the occasional trick which PS does better or smoother. So what? It has gotten the job done. Every time. Thousands of times over nearly 23 years. I raise my virtual paperhat to these dogged, reliable, persistent people. A birthday present will be forthcoming.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#96

Post by TylerE » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 7:55 AM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #34

jes5199 wrote: post #14

GIMP is such a strange tool. I actually have used it, semi-frequently - since the 90s! The overall experience of using it has only changed a little in that time. And it gets the job done. I guess that makes it successful! What else has been so stable? But of all the software I have ever used, GIMP is the most difficult to learn. I memorized a few tutorials, this must have been around Y2K, to do the a couple things. A…

As a counterpoint I often hear people make this argument but I've never found that to be the case. I find Gimp to have a simple interface in which it's easy to find all the features. However I never used Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. I have found that people who cut their teeth on Photoshop seem to consistently find the Gimp UI confusing.

Gimp, today, feels like a bad knockoff of what Photoshop was in about 2002.

And Photoshop has gotten a _lot_ more powerful and useable since then.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#97

Post by unhammer » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 7:57 AM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #12

dwiize wrote: post #5

Finally time for a new name?

Between it's derogatory and sexual definitions, I can't realistically use an app called "GIMP" at work even if I was personally comfortable with it. If you're in a similar position, try Glimpse. https://glimpse-editor.github.io/

Meh. Try living in Norway and explaining to your boss about how you had a bug in your poo (bash).

(Ambiguity grows exponentially the number of languages you switch between, meaning the possibility for innuendo does too =P)

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#98

Post by BuildTheRobots » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:01 AM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #53

jes5199 wrote: post #14

GIMP is such a strange tool. I actually have used it, semi-frequently - since the 90s! The overall experience of using it has only changed a little in that time. And it gets the job done. I guess that makes it successful! What else has been so stable? But of all the software I have ever used, GIMP is the most difficult to learn. I memorized a few tutorials, this must have been around Y2K, to do the a couple things. A…

It's funny because GIMP is one of the tools I hate the most. It's really hard to describe how quickly I want to say no to just about everything that it does. I'm quite open[0] but I'd rather write perl script with imagemagik than use gimp. [0] i can love both emacs and vi and even ed, I've used just about any 2d/3d program ever

> It's funny because GIMP is one of the tools I hate the most.

You've obviously not tried to replace Adobe Illustrator with Inkscape ;)

(edit: a flippant comment backed by much frustration. If you're creating SVGs for laser cutting then the inability to nicely use mm as a unit of measure is infuriating.)

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#99

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:09 AM UTC

mushbino wrote: post #56

Is it possible to contribute to the user experience of GIMP? I've tried GIMP a number of times over the past 20 years and it's just totally illogical, imo. It would be great to have an open source alternative to an Adobe product that was more well thought through.

[deleted]

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#100

Post by aspyct » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:12 AM UTC

Hey, happy birthday GIMP! I've been a user since, oh, 2005 I believe.

I've always found the interface easy to use, and I'm really surprised to see so many people complaining about it here.

GIMP has always been my go-to tool for simple tasks like cropping, resizing and compressing images.

More recently, I started using it for photo post processing (see also RawTherapee), and I couldn't be happier!

25 years is a long time in software terms. Kudos for keeping the project alive and useful this long. Please, keep up the good work :)

You know what? I don't think there's any other app I've been using for 15 years.