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GIMP Turns 27

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Re: GIMP Turns 27

#281

Post by Sakos »

midoridensha wrote: post #242
oblio wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should drop this "healthy competition" myth. Some of this software has been around as long as I've been alive. I love Open Source but we should just accept that some of it will always be mediocre at best. And as the other commenter mentioned, there are also negative consequences to something being around (mind share, presence in distributions and online docs, etc). Nobody has time to wait 4 decades for software to…

This is one of the big problems with so much open-source/Free software: there's a lot of fragmentation, and competition between projects reduces mindshare and developer resources (which were already scarce). So as a result, these projects never become all that popular. There's a few counter-examples of truly exemplary FOSS software that achieved a dominant position and managed to avoid too much fragmentation so that…

You say that as if people would be working on the same project otherwise. Guaranteed if they aren't able to work on their competing project in the name of "solidarity", they probably wouldn't work on the other project instead. There are too many social and cultural barriers to being able to enact change in existing projects, which is why competing projects exist. People have different priorities, values, preferences, etc. You're never going to be able to unify all of that to the satisfaction of everybody involved and it would just lead to way too much strife and politics. Way less would get done.

I hate Gnome, but I know people like it. I'm happy that both KDE and Gnome exist, because it also means the people who made the decisions about Gnome's direction won't be making those same decisions about KDE.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#282

Post by ArclightMat »

lmm wrote: post #197
WoodenChair wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know if it's just americans not wanting to touch a European project or what, but it's just infuriating That's some weird complex. I doubt most people know what piece of free software is European versus American. I further doubt it has any meaningful impact on adoption.

I agree it's bizzare, but why else would it be that all the US Linux distros use Gnome and all the European ones use KDE?

It is undeniable that corporate Linux has prefered GNOME over Plasma, I can't name you a single relevant European distro that uses Plasma as its default.

- Canonical (United Kingdom) ships GNOME for Ubuntu.

- SUSE (Germany) ships GNOME as default on their SUSE Enterprise Linux, openSUSE hsa no defaults.

- Manjaro (Austria, France, Germany according to DistroWatch) ships XFCE (GTK based) by default.

- Mint (Ireland) ships 3 GTK desktops, defaulting to Cinnamon.

Meanwhile, on America:

- Valve (USA) ships Plasma on SteamOS for their desktop experience.

- System76 (USA) ships (although they hate it) GNOME for PopOS. They want to replace it with a Rust-based, GTK/Qt-free alternative.

- Red Hat (USA) ships GNOME as their official desktop for RHEL.

- Fedora (USA) ships GNOME as their official desktop.

So I don't think country impacts much, it is just that GTK is the de facto toolkit for Linux and historically, Qt wasn't FOSS and GNOME received a lot of development for accessibility during Sun's days, which matters a lot for corporate due to stricter requirements on that front.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#283

Post by danuker »

Gigachad wrote: post #100
anigbrowl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a useful tip. I note the Glimpse people also have the marketing skills to put multiple pictures of the software on the landing page. Sadly Glimpse is on a development hiatus, according to the FAQ.

They try to hide this fact but the entire purpose of the Glimpse fork was the forker was upset about the name GIMP and wanted to rename it. No one cared and the years moved on so it's not surprising it's abandoned. See how they never mention GIMP by name and have a code of conduct as one of the nav bar links.

> No one cared

That is strange, judging by the reactions on this HN story.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#284

Post by RadiozRadioz »

troad wrote: post #277
RadiozRadioz wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you probably wouldn't teach your kid to use GIMP as a first image editor, just like you wouldn't teach them LaTeX as their first way to produce documents. I agree, Krita is better for new users. Google "gimp" for me. What are the top results? What's highlighted in the sidebar? I don't see an issue. You have to scroll down a ways before you get to Urban Dictionary, I can't imagine a kid doing that instead of click…

If I google the word 'gimp' in a private browsing tab (so not logged in, no cookies, safe search on), I get these three links - with Google showing the article images! - in a news box after the third result: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1698408/gimp-essex-slams-b... - https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/gimp-man-essex-somerset-... - https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/gimp-man-essex-says-so... Then there's the…

I repeated your experiment and do not see the news box. I see those articles if I select the News tab. Otherwise the results match my findings. I'm willing to concede that those articles can show up to certain users, however they are definitely not the first results, which is important to note.

I am certainly less informed than yourself about the Australian lexicon. I was wrong to jump to the most widely recognized example and should have picked a different one which matched my point more closely, and one on which I was more informed.

My point was not that "cunt" is acceptable in businesses meetings, my point was that it was comparatively _more acceptable in common parlance_ than in other cultures. The message being that the words themselves are not innately offensive, but the meanings attached to them that can vary with time and context, and their impact can be lessened by repeat exposure in a non-offensive setting. I believe that is preferable to outright banning certain phonemes and maintaining their offensive power.

You can see this in action in our Google example - the image editor has the top results and the offensive term is in the newsbox (which we've proved is not universal), and lower down on the search page. The more popular the editor gets, the less prominent the other results are. I think that's a good thing.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#285

Post by troad »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #284
troad wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I google the word 'gimp' in a private browsing tab (so not logged in, no cookies, safe search on), I get these three links - with Google showing the article images! - in a news box after the third result: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1698408/gimp-essex-slams-b... - https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/gimp-man-essex-somerset-... - https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/gimp-man-essex-says-so... Then there's the…

I repeated your experiment and do not see the news box. I see those articles if I select the News tab. Otherwise the results match my findings. I'm willing to concede that those articles can show up to certain users, however they are definitely not the first results, which is important to note. I am certainly less informed than yourself about the Australian lexicon. I was wrong to jump to the most widely recognized e…

I apologise - I double checked and I was wrong about the search results. I get those results on DuckDuckGo, not Google. Not great for DDG, but not the same as Google results.

I understand and appreciate your point, but I'm going to have to disagree with you that the goal - when naming software - is to rehabilitate words, and that of all words the word 'gimp' is in particular need of rehabilitation. Its main use today appears to be in the fetish community, and I'm absolutely fine with that! But it's not a good name or association for an unrelated image editor, in my mind.

I just don't think it is a good idea to put loaded language into people's Start bars, whatever the author's intention, when the people just want to use an image editor.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#286

Post by robinsonb5 »

midoridensha wrote: post #242
oblio wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should drop this "healthy competition" myth. Some of this software has been around as long as I've been alive. I love Open Source but we should just accept that some of it will always be mediocre at best. And as the other commenter mentioned, there are also negative consequences to something being around (mind share, presence in distributions and online docs, etc). Nobody has time to wait 4 decades for software to…

This is one of the big problems with so much open-source/Free software: there's a lot of fragmentation, and competition between projects reduces mindshare and developer resources (which were already scarce). So as a result, these projects never become all that popular. There's a few counter-examples of truly exemplary FOSS software that achieved a dominant position and managed to avoid too much fragmentation so that…

It's somewhat ironic that you've included X.org in that list given (a) its history, and (b) how much time and effort has been spent in recent years on creating something to replace it.

You're right that fragmentation can be an issue - but it's often a people problem, not a technical problem: if I have strong feelings on how a particular piece of software should work, and it's made clear that the project leads disagree and any patch to implement such will be rejected, I'm not likely to invest hobby / recreational development time in any other aspect of that project. (That's not meant as a criticism of the hypothetical project leads - merely an observation that when people work on project for the enjoyment of it, rather than for a living, the bar is raised massively in terms of how much a developer needs to "believe" in the project and the direction it's taking.)

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#287

Post by filmgirlcw »

lmm wrote: post #198
RubyRidgeRandy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking into it, Krita does seem very capable. I don't think we should really be mad at healthy competition existing in these spaces though, they should lead to better tools for end users.

Only if better tools are actually getting into users' hands though. I don't know what exactly has gone wrong, but somehow it's the Gimp that keeps getting recommended to those end users.

Yeah, I think this is a good point. GIMP has been a default app on so many distros for so many years (to say nothing of existing on virtually every copy pasta “best FOSS/Linux/Free apps list” that lazy SEO bloggers (and now YouTubers) have been making for decades), it’s become just one of those defacto apps that gets all the attention/is the go-to suggestion, even though it isn’t the best option for a lot of people.

And that would be fine if there was a robust community around the project, but there isn’t? Like, I’m not blaming the few maintainers and I’m not blaming the dwindling third party community at all. But I am going to be critical of the distros that continue to install it by default (Ubuntu dropped it as a default many years back IIRC, but Debian and Fedora still include it) and the people that just parrot it as what new users should use, even tho the most fervent defenders admit it is not at all competitive with what you need in an image editing tool in 2022.

Edit: turns out Ubuntu dropped GIMP as a default app in 2009 and someone that seems like yesterday. Changed that sentence accordingly.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#288

Post by filmgirlcw »

gryf wrote: post #34
Daub wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently made the move to Affinity Photo. The latest version gives me all I need. Muscle memory is still with Potatoshop, but I’m slowly transferring.

I have been contemplating this move as well and nearly bought the whole Serif package on sale but I am Adobe's bitch and getting too old not to just pay for the problem to go away.

I will say, the Affinity Suite (which just got a great 2.0 update) is excellent. I still use Creative Cloud because work pays for it, but I finally canceled my personal subscription and I just use Affinity or Acorn when I need to do something quick and dirty.

An advantage I will say is that if you have more than two machines, Affinity doesn’t make you do the license login song and dance. Because I am frequently using at least 3 computers (and often it’s 5), I like that I don’t even have to have Creative Cloud installed on everything, because it’s just easier that way.

For me, Adobe is still better in some ways/more familiar, but Affinity is getting so close that I’m very happy we have this sort of tool as an alternative.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#289

Post by jacob019 »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #272
thrillgore wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GIMP is still pretty important because it at least gave you options over buying or pirating Photoshop. Nowadays, I use Affinity Photo over any of them, but the importance of choice matters, because piracy doesn't impact Adobe's reach. It further entrenches it as the norm. Today, with Krita, Affinity, Pixelmator and the like, I would never suggest its "morally right" to pirate Photoshop, because you will still…

GIMP has always claimed to be a replacement for Photoshop, and has always failed to live up to that claim when I've tried it. After being lied to, I'm not eager to try again and see if I'll be lied to again. I'll just use Photoshop because it has always worked where GIMP never has. If GIMP has truly, finally achieved their stated claims of replacing Photoshop (presumably through feature parity), then I'm glad to hear…

I love GIMP. I don't care for photoshop.

Re: GIMP Turns 27

#290

Post by hallarempt »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #272
thrillgore wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GIMP is still pretty important because it at least gave you options over buying or pirating Photoshop. Nowadays, I use Affinity Photo over any of them, but the importance of choice matters, because piracy doesn't impact Adobe's reach. It further entrenches it as the norm. Today, with Krita, Affinity, Pixelmator and the like, I would never suggest its "morally right" to pirate Photoshop, because you will still…

GIMP has always claimed to be a replacement for Photoshop, and has always failed to live up to that claim when I've tried it. After being lied to, I'm not eager to try again and see if I'll be lied to again. I'll just use Photoshop because it has always worked where GIMP never has. If GIMP has truly, finally achieved their stated claims of replacing Photoshop (presumably through feature parity), then I'm glad to hear…

Except that GIMP never has claimed that. Sure, some users of GIMP have made that claim, and many reviews in magazines (back when those still existed) and on website have made that claim, but the GIMP people have always made clear that they are making their own thing, not an X-replacement.
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