Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why GIMP is Inadequate

troy-sobotka.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 108 posts

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#61

Post by arethuza »

sgift wrote: post #12
webuiarchitect wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the noticeable difference is Gimp sucks!! Hats off to the Gimp development team for pulling off so many features and above all having an open-source product out there. But the problem is PhotoShop has set the expectations way too high. And I'm afraid, a non-commercial product will never be able reach that level.

Are there any arguments why a non-commercial product (not necessarily Gimp) will never be able to reach "that level"? This looks suspiciously like "open source software is always worse than closed source!!!!!" which has been refuted more than once.

I don't think anyone doubts that for things like OS kernels, database engines, web frameworks, browsers, libraries, editors etc. FOSS software easily wins.

But for end-user applications where you pay for the competition and where the typical end-users are not developers, or similar, (e.g. MS Office, PaintShop, most games) then FOSS versions seem rather poor by comparison.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#62

Post by rbanffy »

DrStalker wrote: post #54
davidw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still though, the sniffy "merely a toy" is kind of over the top. Are automobiles merely toys because they don't have the range, passenger capacity and speed of a Boeing 747? How about motor scooters? And bicycles? The Gimp is not as good as Photoshop. Is it good enough for many uses? Sure.

Having an attitude of "It's good enough" is probably why GIMP has made such a small amount of progress in recent years.

Indeed. And having progress per se is what proprietary software like Photoshop has to do in order to sell more licenses. Why would you buy the most recent CS version if Photoshop 6 was certainly good enough?

The logic is different. GIMP does not have to evolve in order to survive. It's open and if you need it doing something it doesn't, you can hire a developer to do it. The fact nobody does it is because it's good enough for what it's used for.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#63

Post by rbanffy »

masklinn wrote: post #53
damncabbage wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, hand on my heart, swear that, as a programmer, I don't think GIMP's UI makes a jot of sense. A week away from GIMP to mess with Photoshop had me converted after the first couple of days, sadly. Photoshop is both a blessing and a curse for OSS. (A blessing that it's a nice shiny target. A curse in that the target is half-way to the moon.)

There are numerous closer targets to shoot for, which are not photoshop but are still pretty darn nice (Acorn or Pixelmator for instance on OSX). OSX also has SeaShore, which I believe is built upon GIMP's tech but with a Cocoa frontend. It is fairly nice.

Wondering how hard would it be to build it on top of GNUStep. Anyone cares to try it?

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#64

Post by mgedmin »

mgkimsal wrote: post #59
unwind wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know (and I've lurking on the gimp developer list for 10+ years), GIMP has never been a GNOME application. So, from that point of view, there's no particular reason to expect it to conform to GNOME's human-interface guidelines, is there?

It uses the same crappy GTK file mgt widget design philosophy as GNOME. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK%2B GTK is the GIMP toolkit, and GTK is run by the GNOME foundation. There's quite a bit of relationship between GTK/GIMP/GNOME, even if it may be mostly historical these days. I've always considered GIMP to be a GNOME app, and most people I know have.

When the GNOME project was founded, they looked around for a widget toolkit, and found Gtk+, that was created for GIMP at that point.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#65

Post by mgedmin »

hackermom wrote: post #56

It's funny how the writer mentions a handful of technically unimportant flaws with GIMP, blowing them out of proportion, but fails to mention the one big thing where GIMP falls flat on its ass: the clunky, unstructured mess of a UI.

That was footnote #1 in the article.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#66

Post by eli »

masklinn wrote: post #53
damncabbage wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, hand on my heart, swear that, as a programmer, I don't think GIMP's UI makes a jot of sense. A week away from GIMP to mess with Photoshop had me converted after the first couple of days, sadly. Photoshop is both a blessing and a curse for OSS. (A blessing that it's a nice shiny target. A curse in that the target is half-way to the moon.)

There are numerous closer targets to shoot for, which are not photoshop but are still pretty darn nice (Acorn or Pixelmator for instance on OSX). OSX also has SeaShore, which I believe is built upon GIMP's tech but with a Cocoa frontend. It is fairly nice.

I bought Pixelmator years ago and it's great for what it is, but it's not really in the same class as Photoshop (or really even GIMP). The UI is clean and functional, but even as an occasional user I run into missing features.

Seashore looks interesting.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#67

Post by davidw »

rbanffy wrote: post #62
DrStalker wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an attitude of "It's good enough" is probably why GIMP has made such a small amount of progress in recent years.

Indeed. And having progress per se is what proprietary software like Photoshop has to do in order to sell more licenses. Why would you buy the most recent CS version if Photoshop 6 was certainly good enough? The logic is different. GIMP does not have to evolve in order to survive. It's open and if you need it doing something it doesn't, you can hire a developer to do it. The fact nobody does it is because it's good e…

+1, although, to be correct, economically "the fact nobody does it" means the cost is higher than the benefit. You could purchase a copy of photoshop for much cheaper than the cost of hiring a good developer for a week.

Open source economics are tricky.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#68

Post by wisty »

damncabbage wrote: post #35
joakin wrote: post #9

I expected this to be a rant or flame, but in fact he has described wonderfully what needs to be said. Besides from all this pro features that GIMP lacks, in my opinion its biggest flaw its the UI. Its poor and raw, and makes sense if you are a programmer... Mainly this is what keeps it far from the regular users I know. Hope It doesnt die, its a very good open source multiplatform editing tool...

I, hand on my heart, swear that, as a programmer, I don't think GIMP's UI makes a jot of sense. A week away from GIMP to mess with Photoshop had me converted after the first couple of days, sadly. Photoshop is both a blessing and a curse for OSS. (A blessing that it's a nice shiny target. A curse in that the target is half-way to the moon.)

Usability is key for a lot of users.

I don't care if my photo editor is good enough for a pro. Pros use Photoshop. A good, free, lightweight editor is what most people need for removing red-eye, putting daemon horns on their third grade teacher, and cropping out their ex.

An open source editor will always be able to do high-end stuff, as long as it has some decent scripting capability. The rest of us just want something simple.

Take Open Office. The reason I switched was the better equation editor, and the tab-complete. I like FireFox because of the tabs and extensions.

There should be more focus on a minimal but usable product, and letting the extensions make up the feature gap.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#69

Post by CrLf »

ZenzerNet wrote: post #31
_delirium wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the difference isn't worth 5$, much less (googles) 999$ (before 100$ rebate). I think Photoshop, like Windows, is a beneficiary of piracy in this respect: if there were no way to get Photoshop for less than $999, there would be a lot more people using alternatives for a lot of niches where Photoshop isn't absolutely necessary. But students, people starting out, small-time freelancers, and even some random home user…

Photoshop Elements is reasonably priced at £58 on Amazon as of right now. The people you're talking about do not NEED the full $1000 package.

They don't NEED it, but they WANT it.

Re: Why GIMP is Inadequate

#70

Post by larrik »

Natsu wrote: post #11
joakin wrote: post #9

I expected this to be a rant or flame, but in fact he has described wonderfully what needs to be said. Besides from all this pro features that GIMP lacks, in my opinion its biggest flaw its the UI. Its poor and raw, and makes sense if you are a programmer... Mainly this is what keeps it far from the regular users I know. Hope It doesnt die, its a very good open source multiplatform editing tool...

I use and love it, but I sincerely wish they'd change the name and the UI. I'm a programmer, but even I didn't realize how much they were hiding in context menus at first until I had to search online to find documentation on how to do the few simple things I can do. The multi-window thing I really don't have much of a problem with, though, even if it was hard to get used to at first. I don't have much use for the hig…

The multi-window thing would be fine, but why does each window need a button on my taskbar? On both Windows or Linux, doing any serious work in GIMP destroys my taskbar's usefulness.

Then, which windows are on top of other windows is never what I expect, even after years of using GIMP.

In my opinion a multi-window image program is the way to go, but GIMP's implementation of it is not.

(P.S. I think Apple's Interface Builder's multi-window implementation is much much worse, however.)

Post reply on HN