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GIMP 3.0 is on the way

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Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#161

Post by CharlesW »

vanderZwan wrote: post #74
James_K wrote: post #68

I'm told it's taken them two decades to release this essential feature. What have they been doing for all this time? I think they need to talk to people who edit photos, and focus their efforts on the many low-hanging fruit which would drastically improve the UX of their app (much like Blender did). Perhaps they are doing this to a degree, I see mentions of UI changes, but I wonder why they only think of it now and i…

I was about to leave this as a top-level comment, but it might be more appropriate as a response to your question. "They" are a handful of maintainers doing relatively thankless work. This is not a well-paid full-time job for them. Take Øyvind Kolås, the maintainer and lead developer of babl/GEGL, which is the technology underlying GIMP 3.0. He's barely being paid for this work. Nowadays he has a patreon, which also…

> "They" are a handful of maintainers doing relatively thankless work. This is not a well-paid full-time job for them.

If the name was changed to something with less of an ick factor, contributors would double. (For anyone who believes the acronym is coincidental, it's confirmed to be inspired by "The Gimp" from Pulp Fiction. https://web.archive.org/web/20201111191926/https://www.xach....)

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#162

Post by James_K »

asddubs wrote: post #158
James_K wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's great that you're doing that, but what if you get hit by a bus? Does the issue just go back into the "never gonna happen" bin? Why do you think it took 20 years to get started on implementing this, and what have you done to ensure that won't happen again? Also, you should implement a raster shape tool before you try to implement a vector one. You'll get the feature out much faster that way.

This comment strikes me as non-constructive. What do you actually want this person to do? Clone themselves? Yes, gimp needs more people working on it to get features out faster. Berating the people actually doing the work until they also quit is certainly not helping

Well there are other people working on GIMP. Perhaps someone should look into what they've been doing for the past 20 years. It seems fairly unlikely to me that they didn't have time to do this, so there must be some other cause to the problem which it might be possible to address. And if the problem has already been solved, it might be good to know how that happened to avoid regressing back to the old state. I think it's productive to try and diagnose the cause of issues like this.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#163

Post by cmyk_student »

James_K wrote: post #156
cmyk_student wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, implementing vector layers and a shape tool is my next planned project after 3.0, so we'll hopefully get that first. :) I've worked on 21+ year old issues, so I'm well aware of longstanding requests. For instance, I helped to implement built-in editable text outline options - another commonly searched for question about GIMP. The time we spent on that could have been spent on a number of other issues, and f…

And it's great that you're doing that, but what if you get hit by a bus? Does the issue just go back into the "never gonna happen" bin? Why do you think it took 20 years to get started on implementing this, and what have you done to ensure that won't happen again? Also, you should implement a raster shape tool before you try to implement a vector one. You'll get the feature out much faster that way.

I imagine another volunteer would come along, just like I did. That's the nature of an open source community project. Since I started, I've seen more developers join and work on their niche (building pipelines, text tool, plug-ins, etc).

I know that one of the behind-the-scenes things that Jehan (the maintainer) has been working on is establishing a foundation in partnership with GNOME. This will allow for easier methods of accepting donations, and developer grants to fund more sustained developer work. That obviously takes away from his coding time (and he's a much, much better programmer than I am!), but long term it will be very beneficial. Part of the GIMP 3.0 delay is due to those kinds of set-up work, where it's not immediately visible but will speed up future development.

For the shape tool, I think it'll be fairly quick once vector layers are implemented. At a high level, we'd just need to have some predefined vector layer shapes that users could manipulate. The functionality is there (one example: https://fosstodon.org/@CmykStudent/112063520232390856), the UI would be the sticking point.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#164

Post by krapp »

CharlesW wrote: post #161
vanderZwan wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to leave this as a top-level comment, but it might be more appropriate as a response to your question. "They" are a handful of maintainers doing relatively thankless work. This is not a well-paid full-time job for them. Take Øyvind Kolås, the maintainer and lead developer of babl/GEGL, which is the technology underlying GIMP 3.0. He's barely being paid for this work. Nowadays he has a patreon, which also…

> "They" are a handful of maintainers doing relatively thankless work. This is not a well-paid full-time job for them. If the name was changed to something with less of an ick factor, contributors would double. (For anyone who believes the acronym is coincidental, it's confirmed to be inspired by "The Gimp" from Pulp Fiction . https://web.archive.org/web/20201111191926/https://www.xach.... )

>If the name was changed to something with less of an ick factor, contributors would double.

No they wouldn't. Most users of free and open source software don't contribute anything, regardless of the name or critical nature of the software they use, much less enough for developers to take a full time income for their work. And most users of GIMP couldn't care less about the name either way.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#165

Post by tuna74 »

James_K wrote: post #154
tuna74 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is thumbnails support in the GTK4 file chooser now. That probably required shitloads of fixes in GTK, but now it works. The way to change projects is to write good code and work together with the other devs that made something you wanted to contribute to and then improve it together.

I fundamentally disagree. The problem isn't that there were no thumbnails, but that it took decades to implement them. The cause of that problem can't seriously have been that people weren't programming hard enough. I think lots of code was likely written in that time. If we assume, as you seem to, that the issue was not enough code being written, then GTK would need to increase its count of contributors by 120 times…

There were no thumbnails because no one wrote the necessary infrastructure before some one actually did. One person did most of the work and there were no other problems than actually writing code.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#166

Post by tuna74 »

heavensteeth wrote: post #75
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GTK4 removed a bunch of APIs for stupid reasons and GIMPs move to 3 started before 4 even existed. Had 4 at least tried to maintain some degree of compatibility then switching from 3 to 4 near the end would have been feasible. But that's not the case. If you aren't Gnome, GTK is not for you.

I feel this. I tried using GTK4 a little while ago and almost immediately switched library when I realised it's simply incapable of doing certain things I needed, usually because either Wayland can't do it or GNOME doesn't need it.

Would you care to actually list those things?

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#167

Post by asddubs »

James_K wrote: post #162
asddubs wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment strikes me as non-constructive. What do you actually want this person to do? Clone themselves? Yes, gimp needs more people working on it to get features out faster. Berating the people actually doing the work until they also quit is certainly not helping

Well there are other people working on GIMP. Perhaps someone should look into what they've been doing for the past 20 years. It seems fairly unlikely to me that they didn't have time to do this, so there must be some other cause to the problem which it might be possible to address. And if the problem has already been solved, it might be good to know how that happened to avoid regressing back to the old state. I think…

"Perhaps someone should audit these volunteers working on a project for free"

It's always easy to handwave away any complexities in a project you know nothing about. It'd be one thing if you had concrete criticisms rather than just going in circles about how you're generally unhappy to an overly patient volunteer, but if your only suggestion is "someone should figure out what's going on", you might as well say nothing.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#168

Post by hulitu »

ginko wrote: post #26
lastdong wrote: post #9

Finally updated UI! I really hope it inspires more updates and brings in even more people, just like when Blender revamped their UX a few years back and saw an amazing boost in popularity.

I hope you can still configure it to have all the different toolboxes in separate windows like before. Also who thought putting stuff like "Cancel" and "OK" into the title bar was a good idea?!

> Also who thought putting stuff like "Cancel" and "OK" into the title bar was a good idea?!

Windows and Google fanboys ?

A titlebar is a titlebar. If you are not able to draw your "OK/Cancel" dialog box somewhere else, just don't do it.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#169

Post by hulitu »

tuna74 wrote: post #165
James_K wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fundamentally disagree. The problem isn't that there were no thumbnails, but that it took decades to implement them. The cause of that problem can't seriously have been that people weren't programming hard enough. I think lots of code was likely written in that time. If we assume, as you seem to, that the issue was not enough code being written, then GTK would need to increase its count of contributors by 120 times…

There were no thumbnails because no one wrote the necessary infrastructure before some one actually did. One person did most of the work and there were no other problems than actually writing code.

> There were no thumbnails because no one wrote the necessary infrastructure before some one actually did.

We are talking about GTK 3, right ?

" Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8? " jwz

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#170

Post by hulitu »

albertzeyer wrote: post #2

I find it a bit weird that Gimp does not use the latest GTK (i.e. GTK4, which was considered stable since 2020), even though GTK originates in the Gimp project itself. It actually seems to be quite a bit behind: This is now the first release of Gimp which started to use GTK3, i.e. before, it even still used GTK2 (reached end-of-life in 2020)?

> I find it a bit weird that Gimp does not use the latest GTK

Which is ? GTK 6 ? GTK is a moving target (like a lot of libraries those days). /s

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