20 Years of GIMP (gimp.org) 352
jones_supa writes: Back in 1995, University of California students Peter Mattis and Kimball Spencer were members of the eXperimental Computing Facility, a Berkeley campus organization. In June of that year, the two hinted at their intentions to write a free graphical image manipulation program as a means of giving back to the free software community. On November 21st, 20 years ago today, Peter Mattis announced the availability of the "General Image Manipulation Program" on Usenet (later "GNU Image Manipulation Program"). Over the years, GIMP amassed a huge amount of new features designed for all kinds of users and practical applications: general image editing, retouching and color grading, digital painting, graphic design, science imaging, and so on. To celebrate the 20th anniversary, there is an update of the current stable branch of GIMP. The newly released version 2.8.16 features support for layer groups in OpenRaster files, fixes for layer groups support in PSD, various user interface improvements, OSX build system fixes, translation updates, and more.
Sadly.. (Score:5, Insightful)
And Sadly its about 10 years since the developers pretty much stopped listening to the users, and 5 years since development ground to a halt.
Pity really, it was hijacked by a group of people with 'certain ideas' of how everything must be, and no willingness to compromise with the general user base.
After that, less and less developers contribute, the user base shrunk (or at best stopped growing).
3.0 has become a sad joke.
All of which is a great great pity. Compare it with Blender, with a healthy and energetic user and developer base, a continuous flow of real and useful new features, and a rapidly growing and actively using user base.
The day GIMP started trying to force people to save in its own proprietary format (to the great unhappiness of a large portion of its user base) rather than the format the file was OPENED in pretty much marks its death.
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Re:Sadly.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also that once your pool of users gets large enough collectively they want EVERYTHING no matter how contradictory those things are.
I've never given a rat's arse about CMYK for example, because essentially everything I do winds up on screen not in print.
I also don't give a rat's arse about the Photoshop UI because I have literally never seen it, never used it and I'm certainly not used to it, nor do I want to re-learn the UI.
Finally, I have a good quality window manager (FVWM), so those bad features which are designed to make GIMP work better on low quality window managers (Windows ports, Gnome) are not only of no interest to me but actively harmful.
I would say that those three things (which while carefully selected are 100% true) are more or less diametrically opposed to what a quite large fraction of GIMP users seem to want, with the last two being mutually exclusive too at lease going by the comments in previous slashdot threads.
There is no way to "listen to your users" when your users want opposite things to each other. Chances are if they listened to me you'd complain that they didn't listen to users and if they listened to you, I'd complain they didn't listen to users.
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However if you go and introduce a change which fundamentally opposes 30 years of UI experience for *everybody* you need serious justification.
In basically every program ever written Save saves a file in the format it was opened in, save-as or export lets you change it.
Gnome goes and makes "save" replace the format with their own, and save as ALSO does that but lets you rename... so now you have ot learn to go File/Export even if you opened the file in the proper format in the first place.
Which is an idiotic
Re:Sadly.. (Score:5, Informative)
In basically every program ever written Save saves a file in the format it was opened in, save-as or export lets you change it.
No. You're flat-out wrong there. A lot of profesional software, for example CAD does not work like that. Save is native format only and NEVER loses information. Information losing always lives in "export". I just fired my copy of Eagle-CAD up and yes, it's as I claim.
File/Export even if you opened the file in the proper format in the first place.
Define: proper. If you opened it in GIMP, the proper format is XCF since that's the only format you can save without loss. Exporting to another format like LJPEG requires compositing into a single layer.
It's a subtle trade-off between maybe having the "right" file format by default and maybe losing information. There's no one right answer, and it's easy to get used to File->Export.
Re:Sadly.. (Score:4, Informative)
Really, in most software, "save" and "export" functionality has been merged. Because "whether or not the format is the preferred format of the program" isn't even an implementation detail. It's a developer preference. It has absolutely no place in the main tool. Having one list of formats for "save" and a different list of formats for "export" is beyond insane. Worse than old-Photoshop's "you can't save in this format, because you are using features X, Y, and Z" (instead of just launching a conversion process) - Gimp doesn't give you the option *whether or not* you're using incompatible features.
Fork (Score:2, Interesting)
As anyone stepped up to create a fork yet?
Unless the code base is truly awful, I wouldn't mind maintaining some user interface sanity patches if there's interest.
I've certainly had enough of XCF being the default saving format when 95% of the time I'm just doing a quick edit on a image.
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There WAS no modern C++ until 2011. If you don't believe that, just consider that the (only) official smart pointer was the hideous monstrosity of std::auto_ptr until std::shared_ptr, std::unique_ptr, and std::weak_ptr supplanted it in c++11. OK, you could have used boost:shared_ptr 10 years ago, which is what I did, but you can't assume that all projects would be allowed to do so.
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Did you stop to think at all before you wrote that? Seriously, read that again to yourself out loud. Can you actually say it with a straight face?
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I understood exactly what was meant: C++98 could not compete as a modern language with a modern standard library, but C++11 could.
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You'd think that a 2d image editor should be a fairly simple job, something handled mostly by standard libraries now. I mean compared to somehting like Blender it is not rocket science, but more an excercise in UI (which needs overhaul anyway) and optimization (which needs new fresh concepts also).
Depends, there are some really simple tools to do simple things. But there's a near infinite way of doing tools and filters with parameters, take for example a noise reduction or edge-detecting sharpening filter or airbrush tool. Of course in theory they all boil down to setting one and one pixel, but there'll always be room for workflow improvements to get you from A to B in the easiest, quickest way yielding the best results.
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Re:Fork (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't that what they're trying to do? Last I heard, they were working on implementing a clean library, GEGL [wikipedia.org] and then they were going to rewrite GIMP to use it.
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I've certainly had enough of XCF being the default saving format when 95% of the time I'm just doing a quick edit on a image.
overwrite the image or export if you don't want to save as an .xcf...
Re:Fork (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, problem is there's just too many people that like it, so even though it is possible to fork very few distros would switch to it.
Why does an image editing program have to be bundled with the operating system? If the fork is better then people will use it, if people aren't even willing to install it separately then obviously it isn't very good.
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No. LibreOffice had the upper hand because it had nearly all the devs, who had gotten good and tired of Sun/Oracle. Losing the bogus Java tie was just a nice bonus.
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Also GNOME, Mozilla, systemd, and so many of the, "Tomorrow belongs to me!" crowd of spoilt geeks who think just because they were successful in their 20s now have reached a nirvana of technocratic wisdom.
Re:Sadly.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what is odd?
In the old days of Linux being new turn of the century all these things were new and many forks existed. Someone didn't like KDE? Then create Gnome. Didn't like WindowMaker? Make Enlightenment. Linux users laughed at those on Windows tied into their app ecosystems saying if it were opensource Office, IE, SAP, Oracle, wouldn't be so impossible to leave etc.
Today no one wants to fork. Things are mature and stable. users fear change. Looking at FOSS in 2015 I hate to say this but Linux grew into the WIndows ecosystem. One app for graphics, gimp. . One app for a gui, gnome. One app for an ide Eclipse, etc. True with the gui part someone will say they use featureX. But for 85% of users things tied to stuff like gnome can't leave so easily. Just like some law firm probably runs Wordperfect somewhere today. But MS word is thee word processing app.
What happened? Or did the kids who thought pcs were cool in 1998 are old farts who have jobs and newer kids want to make newer mobile apps for their phones and do not care about legacy pcs anymore?
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Wait, Free is supposed to mean getting users to pay? I guess I'm old fashioned because to me "free" equals "not paid for".
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It is impossible to take you seriously after such a blatantly and phenomenally absurd claim. There are many, many, many choices for the Linux user in each of those three categories.
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You know what is odd? (...) Today no one wants to fork. Things are mature and stable. users fear change. Looking at FOSS in 2015 I hate to say this but Linux grew into the WIndows ecosystem. One app for graphics, gimp. . One app for a gui, gnome. One app for an ide Eclipse, etc. True with the gui part someone will say they use featureX. But for 85% of users things tied to stuff like gnome can't leave so easily. Just like some law firm probably runs Wordperfect somewhere today. But MS word is thee word processing app. What happened?
Primarily, the world went dynamic. We plug in and pull out all kinds of devices, accessories, monitors and whatnot, we pair up with Bluetooth and WiFi, we change power states, sleep states and so on. That kinda requires an IPC system and event loop, which is neither core C/C++ nor POSIX. The other part is that we want global settings for consistency. To be honest, I don't know how I could write an application that "plays nice" without using some kind of framework. If the framework shouldn't provide it, you
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There are plenty of people who care about legacy PC's. There are dozens of light-weight distro's of Linux that run on old PC's. But these guys just take a standard Linux distribution, scoop out the packages they don't want and bundle it on a live CD, DVD or memory stick. They don't try and do anything with a modern clean GUI, or perhaps they can't because at the bottom of all the GUI systems is the "nouveau" graphics driver that comes built into many kernels as an alternative to Nvidia's blobware.
I
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Apart from things like Enlightenment, the window manager that Rob Malda posted things about before he started Slashdot, a window manager that has been changed and updated a lot and still performs on slow hardware. It even uses OpenGL if you let it.
Re:Sadly.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The day GIMP started trying to force people to save in its own proprietary format (to the great unhappiness of a large portion of its user base) rather than the format the file was OPENED in pretty much marks its death.
It doesn't "mark its death" at all. Lots of us continue to use the GIMP daily, and are more or less happy with it, while simultaneously being a bit annoyed by the decision to try to push the native file format on us through the interface. Since the menu option to overwrite the opened file was added, it's much less annoying. It's such a common thing on Slashdot to announce the complete failure of a long-term project just on the basis that the poster and his friends (if he has any) are annoyed by one or two changes that didn't suit them. There should be a word for it. The GIMP is a very useful, highly functional, stable and reliable piece of software. It's not perfect, but nothing is. Get some perspective.
Re:Get some perspective. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Been using GIMP to do real, "professional" work for about 15 years.
But I'm not some AC with a propensity for self-serving generalisations, so what do I know.
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I notice you put "professional" in quotes.
That says a lot, really.
I'm not entirely sure what you meant to imply by that, but I have been using GIMP to do pixel art work in projects for which I was paid.
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If a co-worker wants to crop baby photos gimp is the tool. If a co-worker wants to take screenshots and put them in reports gimp is the tool. If an expensive per hour graphic artist wants to do something that it took them ages to learn then something like photoshop is the tool. For those of us who didn't go to art school gimp is mo
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You sir however do indeed seem to be a tool. A complete and utter one.
What is it with these people?
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I notice you put "professional" in quotes.
That says a lot, really.
GIMP is not even a shadow of PhotoShop, both in functionality and usability, and never will be.
Oh FFS. One of the "my definition of professional is the real professional" hardliners. Professional is stuff done for money, which usually means stuff done for businesses/public sector by businesses. Just take a look around you walking. Not everything is an iPhone advert in a high end magazine. Then again, half the iPhone ads seem to be photos desi
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And the open-source world has nothing that even approaches Lightroom.
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Digicam is a much better Digital Asset Manager (DAM) than Lightroom, however Lightroom does some half arsed raw developing for people who don't know how to use Photoshop.
I say this as a semi-professional photographer/artist who uses Photoshop and Lightroom almost daily.
I tried to use GIMP, but things like actions, and some advanced editing techniques were just too hard or less efficient in GIMP.
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5 years since development ground to a halt.
Pity really, it was hijacked by a group of people with 'certain ideas' of how everything must be, and no willingness to compromise with the general user base.[...]Compare it with Blender, [..] a continuous flow of real and useful new features
I'm actually happy that the Gimp is resilient to changes just for the sake of changes. I does what it has to do and it does it very well. It has great support for various file formats. Never crashes. Can do all kind of neat tricks and if it can't you can write or download a filter to do it.
And best of all: it doesn't bother me to learn `new improved` interface. The Gimp of 2015 is about the same as 10 years ago, with only minor conservative changes - for better or for worse - to the user interface. While i
Re:Dependency with SystemD (Score:2)
Too bad the latest version is integrated with SystemD so you can't leave init.
Fork? (Score:2)
Why not fork from them and make your own Gimp version since it is open sourced?
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Compare it with Blender, with a healthy and energetic user and developer base, a continuous flow of real and useful new features, and a rapidly growing and actively using user base.
Feel free to correct me, but GIMP doesn't have the kind of sponsors [blender.org] that Blender has. But the help you get in the forums involves a lot of "works for me" defensiveness and that drives users away.
The day GIMP started trying to force people to save in its own proprietary format (to the great unhappiness of a large portion of its user base) rather than the format the file was OPENED in pretty much marks its death.
Native, not proprietary (the spec is out there [gnome.org] and you're free to write readers/writers for it). Do you know of any other open format that preserves the structure of a GIMP doc?
As for writing back to the original format, I just opened a random PNG to double-check. Sure enough, under the File menu, Save (Control-S) a
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pretty much spot on. I would add that GIMP scripts are nowhere near as easy or useful as Photoshop actions.
GIMP has many quirks, and you can do a lot of things but most of the time creating the same effect is easier and/or faster in Photoshop.
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The day GIMP started trying to force people to save in its own proprietary format (to the great unhappiness of a large portion of its user base) rather than the format the file was OPENED in pretty much marks its death.
Have you even used GIMP recently? If you open a file in GIMP that is not in GIMP's native XCF format, there is an "Overwrite image_file_name" option in the "File" menu that does exactly what you want (i.e., does exactly what the "Save" option used to do).
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The day GIMP started trying to force people to save in its own proprietary format (to the great unhappiness of a large portion of its user base) rather than the format the file was OPENED in pretty much marks its death.
Which would be a problem if it were closed source yet this is exactly the reason we always hear that programs should be open source, so that things you don't like can be changed and/or improved.
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I haven't used gimp for a number of years... but it seems most common image editing tools choose their own proprietary format by default (photoshop and pixelmator immediately come to mind) - so I'm not sure why gimp should be any different. And they all make it easy to choose a different format for export... which I bet gimp does as well. While it may be annoying at times, it is understandable - I don't see why it would be a deal breaker.
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It used to be the same Save dialog. Then they changed it, so now Save is .xcf and anything else requires Export.
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This is a clear case of irritatingly pedantic developer vs. user who just wants to do something. I've been on both sides of the coin, and it isn't always easy to see a clear way forward. I feel they got it wrong in this case.
Re:Sadly.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I still find GIMP highly useful, perhaps more so than ever, and I like the price compared to being robbed by Adobe and forced to use an OS that I wish to avoid.
No, I'm not a high end visual artist, I just need to do some things at a medium level of expertise. GIMP works for that and I'm glad to have it. Maybe if I was a high-ender I'd have a different opinion, but most of us are not.
XCF? Who cares. It's not hard to save and also do an export. I'm sure the point of XCF is to not lose information.
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Wasn't there a story a couple of years ago about Adobe releasing the ancient versions of some of their products, including PS6 for free on their FTP site or something? If so, then you certainly could run PS6 in wine for free for simple jobs.
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In a normal program, the program warns you if you modify a file and then try to close the program without saving. Because you have to export instead of saving, this warning becomes useless.
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The warning isn't useless at all. You don't "have to export instead of saving." You do both. You save your work, then export when ready.
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So how do you tell whether you've changed the image since exporting?
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To be fair, I had pain with word processors that warn you that "warning, you will lose important information blah-blah because you're saving in .rtf".
Fine, but the only complicated thing was a table with two columns and some "underlining". Single page document with nothing really going on.
Now, why the hell couldn't it interoperate cleanly between AbiWord and Libreoffice or Word and Libreoffice? Or seemingly, LibreOffice with itself?
Now I still have at least one version of the RTF document that mattered, but
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Re: Sadly.. (Score:2)
Yes.. But that opens another question.
With the current rates of progress.. Will gegl based gimp as a full release with clean 16 bit be available before or after the heat death of the universe?
I suspect it will be a close call either way.
Development more these days has quite clearly moved into 'tinker with what the development god decided is flavor of the year' mode rather than any actual progress plan. Has been like that for a long long time.
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because some smartass decided the save option you actually want should be ^E instead of ^S.
It's open source! Changing the shortcut for Save and Export would be trivial and you could just merge your patch into your private branch on each release. What is the point of open source if this is actually a genuine complaint?
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A Few Years Ago.... (Score:2)
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Still on going... it's a rather big engine rewrite, last that I checked gegl was going through the final stages. I would assume that it's in use by this point, and most fixing to it would be for edge-cases.
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GEGL is mostly complete. The work that's happening today is to port all of Gimp to make use of GEGL which is the goal of Gimp 2.10. Gimp 2.10 has been in development for a few years now should it should be due for release within a couple of years.
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I have a few moderation points to use but I cannot figure out if I should classified your post as Troll, Insightful or Funny.
The thing that pisses me off with gimp is not the UI or saving by default to XCF. I am interested by raw image processing and I would be very happy to use and to contribute to the new 16bit depth features. Unfortunately, the GIMP devs are actively doing everything they can to prevent peoples from trying the current development version. No major release for more than 3 years and no ava
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Speedy Slashdot (Score:3)
Posted by samzenpus on 2015-11-22 16:00 from the happy-birthday dept.
On November 21st, 20 years ago today
Port Paint.net to Linux (Score:2)
How about we port Paint.net to Linux using Mono? It is opensourced and can do many of the same functions. It can't be too hard to port and will require hell of alot less effort than rewriting Gimp. It is designed for plugins and already has a much better menu system
Re:Port Paint.net to Linux (Score:4, Informative)
There's Pinta [pinta-project.com]:
Pinta is a free, open source drawing/editing program modeled after Paint.NET. Its goal is to provide users with a simple yet powerful way to draw and manipulate images on Linux, Mac, Windows, and *BSD.
Tried it, couldn't use it (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried using GIMP, I really did. I gave it several good chances, struggled with the docs, struggled learning the hotkeys, struggled with the sometimes-different names for stuff in the interface, etc etc...I really did. But I just couldn't use it as fluidly and as productively as either Photoshop or CorelDraw.
Maybe it was me, maybe it wasn't...all I know is I liked the idea of a truly open-source graphics tool and I would have been happy to support it but I just never really felt like I was getting in the groove with it, so to speak.
And then Photoshop started coming out with boatloads of brushes and plugins and filters that did some genuinely cool and useful stuff, and I just stopped using GIMP. I had stuff to do and for whatever reason I found I could always manage to do it in Photoshop faster and more easily than GIMP. I don't know why.
There are also about a billion tutorials on Photoshop available (some good, some that suck) and I could almost always find a page with info on what I needed to do in Photoshop. Sadly, the same simply wasn't true of GIMP. The docs were "eh" but the lack of a good tutorial base was a major stumbling block for me personally.
I'm probably not the only one to go through this. I really liked the idea of using GIMP but it just never really coalesced for me.
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There was a fork called GIMPshop that made the UI more like photoshop. Unfortunately, the author abandoned the project after someone else scooped up the website gimpshop.com and made money off of ads and installer/crapware (and donations as well, I think).
Would be nice if someone would fork it again, but there's the rub -- not everyone that cares is a coder and those that are must be working on more rewarding projects... or have lives or something.
Re:Tried it, couldn't use it (Score:5, Informative)
When you open GIMP, it throws up so many Windows that I just get totally confused
This complaint has cropped up several times on this thread already. That is somewhat incredible, because GIMP has supported a single-window interface for years. Select "Single-Window Mode" from the "Windows" menu, and the "so many windows" will become one window.
Re:Tried it, couldn't use it (Score:5, Interesting)
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...they were so bitterly reticent about it.
Are you sure about that? Single-window mode was the top "new feature" that the GIMP team highlighted in the version 2.8 release notes [gimp.org]. It seemed like it was a feature they were excited to have, not something they were trying to quietly implement without anyone noticing.
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Once people got more than a single workspace (virtual desktops) or another monitor it made sense to go that way.
Still, if you are stuck on a single monitor with no virtual desktops the single window gimp where you use the application as a window manger (to make up for the shortcomings of the OS) sort of makes sense.
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Inkscape, on the other hand, is quite nice.
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It's not a coreldraw or photoshop clone it is it's own thing instead of a later copy so treating it like a copy will only end in disappointment.
If you have already paid for the other ones why are you using gimp?
As for me, I went from AutoCAD to photoshop and was extremely pissed off that it did not have undo at the time - treating it like something else will only end in disappointment.
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I can speak to this. I focus a lot of my free time on the usability of free/open source software, and a few years ago, I looked into the usability of GIMP. I didn't do a full usability test, but conducted surveys of different people who used GIMP, versus Photoshop. What I found is that a person's perception of GIMP's usability depends on their familiarity with Photoshop:
People who used Photoshop all the time complained that GIMP had poor usability. This seemed to be because people knew they way around Phot
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Why use Gimp in that case? For that kind of stuff, MS Paint works...
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I can't even train myself to use GIMP with that horrible UI.
Does that include having tried choosing Single-Window Mode from the Windows menu?
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I started using Photoshop at version 3.0. and used it for several versions until it got too expensive. I moved to GIMP for several years, and got quite good using it, but then I had an opportunity to try Photoshop again. I hunkered down and learned the "new way" of using Photoshop, with layer masks, adjustment layers, etc. Gimp can do a lot of similar things, but not as easily, as quickly, or as accurately. (accurate may not be the right word, but it is much easier to fine tune things in Photoshop)
In short,
Gnu image is a quality product (Score:2)
gtk+ (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't forget that the project's widget library, the GIMP Toolkit, became one of the most popular widget libraries, and spawned GNOME as well.
A good point, but poorly phrased. (Score:4, Insightful)
The parent comment actually does make a very good, and relevant, point: the open source community would have been much better off if GTK+ had never been developed. From its very beginning it wasn't much more than a really bad rip-off of Motif, a toolkit which itself was already considered ancient and awful at that time. Things only went downhill from there. GTK+ begat GNOME, which only served to split the open source desktop community. Those who wanted a solid, reliable, usable desktop environment backed Qt and KDE. Those who were ideologically driven went with GTK+, although inferior to Qt, and GNOME, although inferior to KDE. This is true even today, so many years later. Qt and KDE are seen as the premiere GUI toolkit and desktop environment, while GTK+ and GNOME play second fiddle. If GIMP had used Qt instead of GTK+, it would've been much more successful. It would've been faster, easier to develop, and would've been portable to more systems. Even today, GTK+ is terrible on OS X and Windows, yet Qt is, for all intents and purposes, essentially native on all of the platforms it supports. It's sometimes claimed that GTK+ being written in C allows for easier bindings for other languages, yet all of the GTK+ bindings are utter shit. Even Gtkmm, the C++ binding for GTK+, is terrible, and it's the binding that should be easiest to have made since almost all C code is a subset of C++! All of the effort put into GTK+ and GNOME has been a total waste. Doing a poor job of imitating Motif was never a good thing. The creation of an entire desktop environment on this mediocre toolkit didn't help, either. And here we are, 2 decades later, and Linux still has no presence on the desktop because of the ideologically-driven schism that GTK+ and GNOME forced on the community that was otherwise very happy using Qt and KDE.
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Trying to write anything using GTK after using Qt feels like going back in time. It's amazing that GTK is still around and so popular, it really is shit.
Dunno if I'd stretch it as far as you have, but definitely agree that as a toolkit Qt kicks GTK's ass and always has.
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GTK grew a crazy C object system and, eventually, Vala, which is pretty cool. Vala is like Apple Swift's distant, evil cousin. I would love to get the chance to program in Qt, given that everyone says it is superior and Qt apps generally look pretty. One thing though: Since about 2003, I've preferred the look/feel of Gnome over KDE.
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Never mind, I was just displaying my ignorance there :p - auto_ptr is deprecated and shared_ptr serves the same purpose but does it better. Now I know.
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Those who wanted a solid, reliable, usable desktop environment backed Qt and KDE. Those who were ideologically driven went with GTK+, although inferior to Qt, and GNOME, although inferior to KDE. This is true even today, so many years later...
Succinct analysis, but it's not about ideology any more, it's strictly commercial. It's about Redhat controlling freedesktop.org, which control would be materially loosened by sharing power with the QT Foundation. Community be damned.
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When used in the traditional gimp multiple-windows mode, the layers list has a separate window shared with paths, channels, and undo history. It's always there, ready for quick use without going through the menu.
Dealing with text in gimp is very inconvenient at best. A completely new technique is needed, something like "text objects" that could be moved, resized, and edited long after their original creation.
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Dealing with text in gimp is very inconvenient at best. A completely new technique is needed, something like "text objects" that could be moved, resized, and edited long after their original creation.
GIMP has had this for years.
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