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GIMP 3.0 is on the way

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Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#171

Post by hulitu »

creshal wrote: post #11
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)?

GTK stands for "Gnome first every other user literally does not matter break them hard, break them often, make them give up ToolKit" these days, and has for quite a while.

The funniest thing is that GTK used to stand for "Gimp toolkit". How times fly.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#172

Post by prmoustache »

init2null wrote: post #159
prmoustache wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is literally an "overwrite file" command in the file menu. You didn't lose data because of bad UI but because you are illiterate. You just said it, it warns you. If you can't understand what "none of the images was saved" means, there is no UI that can save you except autosave. But autosave is something you clearly don't want in a photo/image editor, even smartphone apps do not autosave photo edits.

That's a rude and somewhat inaccurate response. Photoshop has autosave that works well, even for files with hundreds of layers, so it can be done. That being said, I can see that it's less useful when someone chooses not to save. As for export, a single-layer file should be considered saved when one exports to lossless. A multi-layer file needs a different prompt, and I note Gimp has that now. It flags the file as "E…

autosave is useful for a file format of working files, like psd if non destructive changes are supported. But it would be stupid for exported end result format like jpeg, png, webp or pdf where changes cannot be recorded.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#173

Post by James_K »

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.

Okay, so what were all the other people doing? If it's one person's worth of work (as I suggested), and there was at least one person working on GIMP, why did they not do it? The fact that it was easy to do doesn't explain why it didn't happen. If anything, it makes it more mysterious. Unless you are genuinely telling me that there wasn't a single person working continuously on GTK for 20 years. It seems to me that they lack a process for deciding something needs to happen and then doing that thing.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#174

Post by James_K »

asddubs wrote: post #167
James_K wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nothin…

I think they would be happy to participate in some kind of audit. They surely want to organise their contributions in such a way as to produce the most benefit to the project. As for suggesting someone figure it out, I don't know why it happens and I would like to know. This is why I ask. I think knowing could benefit others and potentially also benefit me.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#175

Post by James_K »

cmyk_student wrote: post #163
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.

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 met…

A foundation definitely seems like a solution here. It worked well for Blender. I just wonder if such a central organisation is truly necessary. Perhaps block-chain is the solution. /s At any rate, I'm glad to see GIMP is starting to take it's role as the flagship of FOSS more seriously.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#176

Post by squigz »

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.... )

That's quite an assertion to make, probably without evidence?

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#177

Post by CharlesW »

squigz wrote: post #176
CharlesW wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.... )

That's quite an assertion to make, probably without evidence?

It's purely anecdotal if that wasn't clear. In my many conversations with folks where GIMP has been mentioned, the same two issues always come up: (1) the anachronistic user experience, and (2) the anachronistic name. Most of the people who could help with (1) aren't interested in a project with (2) on their CV.

A good exercise is to imagine seeing a Show HN for the project RETARD or CRIPPLE, and how proud you'd be sharing the details of your work on RETARD with a prospective employer.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#178

Post by EasyMark »

0points wrote: post #51
joaomacp wrote: post #22

I use Gimp from time to time, and often get frustrated with its... unique UI. It's nice to see they're hearing feedback and working on it :D A tip for others that feel the same: if you've used Photoshop before and are used to its UI, try the free Photopea website. It's a Photoshop "clone" that works really well in web (I believe it's a solo dev doing it too). It's replaced Gimp for me lately.

I would recommend Krita instead of a website. Websites are not automatically free or opensource, they also require internet access and can sneakily copy the files you are working with. If photopea is free today, it may cost money tomorrow. Krita exists for Windows and macOS too nowadays. https://krita.org/en/

Krita works well for me on linux, but I get a lot of random crashes and weird graphics issues on Mac, It’s not worth it there for me. Not idea about windows.

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#179

Post by nox101 »

I'm happy gIMP is still being worked on. That said, I'm a photoshop user and I find all my personal needs are covered by Photopea (https://photopea.com). It feels like it duplicates all of the photoshop features I regularly use including non-destructive editing, smart layers, and non-destructive layer blending options like stroke, outline, outer-shadow, inner-shadow, solid-color, that I use often. And it runs instantly on any machine I'm at

It's not open source though so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: GIMP 3.0 is on the way

#180

Post by nineteen999 »

idoubtit wrote: post #97
joaomacp wrote: post #22

I use Gimp from time to time, and often get frustrated with its... unique UI. It's nice to see they're hearing feedback and working on it :D A tip for others that feel the same: if you've used Photoshop before and are used to its UI, try the free Photopea website. It's a Photoshop "clone" that works really well in web (I believe it's a solo dev doing it too). It's replaced Gimp for me lately.

Many years ago, I lost my work because of this "unique UI" and pledge never to use Gimp again, unless its behavior changed. When you open a non-Gimp file, for instance a PNG, and you want to update the source file, you need to "export" to PNG. And if you close the tab, Gimp warns you that your work isn't saved, because it hasn't been saved in its native xcf format. There is no way to know if the work has been saved t…

This is one of the weirder design changes that Gimp made, and it wasn't always that way. IIRC, the "save" option worked as you described in 2.0 but changed to the newer behaviour in either 2.2 or 2.4. Baffling because it really does change the workflow and coupled with the GTK+ load/save dialog boxes, it really has become much less intuitive than it used to be.
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