Gimp 2.9.4 Released | Hacker News Reader

Gimp 2.9.4 Released

gimp.org

504 pointsmacco225 comments

I've been using Gimp for many years now, and it serves me well. I learnt Photoshop at university, on a Multimedia Tech course. Whilst Photoshop is a fine piece of software, it is overkill for most users. Gimp might be hard to get to grips with for long-time Photoshop users, but it isn't hard, it just takes some muscle-memory adjustment. For users who have never used either, Gimp is a great piece of software to use from the get-go.

I've also used Krita of late, and that too is a very good piece of software worth checking out if you want to do photo-editing and digital painting.

here's the problem. Photoshop blows gimp out of the water in every way that is important to designers. GIMP is quite adept at simpler tasks/flows i.e. the stuff most people might want to do to an image, crop, put some text, etc. really no major diff here between it and ps. and this is why i teach it to relatives/friends who want to edit their images on a budget.

But it is very difficult to make professional grade designs/templates/mockups with gimp (i would venture impossible but im sure someone could do it given enough discipline just as someone could build a httpserver in pure x86 if they really wanted to)

source: long time Gimp and Photoshop user, have worked professionally as a UX/UI/Graphic designer and software developer, and have really tried to get on board with gimp bc its open source, saves $50 monthly, and is hackable all unlike ps, it even has a lisp scripting language! I couldnt do it even with that much goodwill so i honestly cant see any less motivated designer using it.

EDIT: of course designers or a ps alternative might not be gimps market at all, and instead just normal end users, in which case gimp should definitely not be criticized. I think people (unjustly perhaps) want gimp to be a ps alternative for designers, its not. plain and simple.

Parent commenter mentioned "most users," designers are the power users in this vertical and wouldn't constitute the majority.

It's fine for most computer users, but not most Photoshop users.

Most designers might be photoshop users, but its not true that most photoshop users are designers.

No layer styles for example makes GIMP unusable for me.

Last time I tried, GIMP couldn't even import a layered image. It just flattened it. Useless. I have Gb of images; I can't even begin to use GIMP unless my investment is preserved.

> Last time I tried, GIMP couldn't even import a layered image.

Glad to see you are back to GIMP for the first time since 1998.

Be fair. Since about 2 years ago. Just installed latest (2.8), and I see it has a new menu item - Open as Layers. So cool.

And also to be fair, from my perspective that leaves GIMP only a few years behind other packages.

Be fair. 'Open as Layer' has been around since 2004:

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=37912655f207306...

So all this time I just missed that menu item? Believable; I am pretty dense sometimes. Gotta wonder why though, with a 'flatten' option already there, there's need for two versions of 'Open File', one that screws you and one that works, but that's probably history.

I admit I use GIMP all the time, and have for years. It has a scripting language (ok just Lisp but with image-processing primitives) that I use to generate hundreds of images for card games. Photoshop has some arcane scripting ability but they sell it. My game club didn't want to pay, which is reasonable. So GIMP has been useful to me for years.

Two posts earlier:

> I can't even begin to use GIMP unless my investment is preserved.

Now:

> I admit I use GIMP all the time, and have for years.

Huh?

Like I said in the previous post, I use it (exclusively) for the scripts. Launch GIMP, run my script, exit. I haven't so much as opened a file in GIMP for years.

> So all this time I just missed that menu item? Believable; I am pretty dense sometimes.

That's quite all right. I'm not perfect either :)

> Gotta wonder why though, with a 'flatten' option already there, there's need for two versions of 'Open File', one that screws you and one that works

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. Open File opennns files as new images. Open as Layer appends an image to an already opened one. Or am I reading you wrong?

> someone could build a httpserver in pure x86 if they really wanted to

You mean something like this? http://asm32.info/index.cgi?page=content/0_MiniMagAsm/index....

EDIT: Scratch that, it's just a CGI application and not an HTTP server on its own. Still, I think it's pretty neat :)

The issue is Gimp tries to look like Photoshop very hard, so people tend to compare the 2. But if we compare 2 Free popular painting software: MS Paint and Gimp, then Gimp is awesome, for non professional use I love Gimp. If I were a professional image editor I would buy Photoshop.

On my windows 10 machine, I hope I'll be able to run Gimp. I don't know if the Linux Subsystem makes it possible. https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4ea4w4/fyi_you_c...

On more than one Windows 10 machine, I have no problems running Gimp 2.8 build for Windows supplied straight from https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ It also works well on Windows 7. I can only assume that means it will probably work OK on the versions between 7 and 10.

I've experienced weird behavior with GIMP on Windows. It mangled my clipboard usage with Teamviewer (wth?), tablet support is hit and miss, and other just plain odd behavior.

That's not a complaint, I've no right to complain as I've not documented and raised the bugs.[1] I've just worked around them, which I appreciate is selfish.

But it works just as well/badly on 7, 8.1u1, and 10 in my experience. And it's still my go-to image editor for anything that Irfanview can't do.

[1]https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRME...

They've had a long history of building or other users compiling versions for Windows - https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ - has Windows and Mac OSX as options, as well as Linux.

On Windows, a better application that sits between MS Paint and GIMP in terms of features, extensibility and power is the free Paint.NET. [1]

[1]: http://www.getpaint.net/

gimp can't even begin to compare with Photoshop on a filter level, especially in areas like burn/dodge. I don't know how it applies it but Photoshops application of filters is much more intelligent. Not to mention Gimp has an absolutely baffling ui philosophy (paste as layer/yellow square/brushes not painting) while Kritas seems sane at least, mimicing popular photoshop features and even improving it in some cases.

In an ideal world, gimp is retired and Krita becomes the Photoshop alternative and the community can focus on really getting behind Krita.

That goes against the product vision of Krita, though. Krita is a painting application, not a photo editor. The defining of the vision was a Eureka moment for the developers. http://blog.mmiworks.net/2010/03/working-on-vision-with.html

This is huge! Gimp is awesome, and the fact that they added support for MyPaint brushes is huge -- it means artists don't have to switch back and forth between the two constantly.

Also, this update puts it in a great stance against Photoshop in general. Now it has a more similar user interface -- something I see people complain about a lot ("Gimp can do everything but I just don't understand the UI like I do with Photoshop"), awesome support for brushes and symmetry (Photoshop was always a bit better with these from what my artist friends told me a few years back), etc.

It is a bit of a shame that the official builds lag behind this update, though. I'm on OS X and I'd love to try this out now, but building from source sounds a bit too tedious for me to play around with it for just ~10 minutes.

I had many hopes for GIMP on OS X but programs like Pixelmator and Affinity Photo (and Designer), while commercial, have made Adobe-level editing affordable (and hopefully sustainable). Is GIMP keeping up?

I had commented below that I am using the unofficial Mac OS X builds[0] of the 2.9.x branch for a year or so now. Works great for my occasional amateur editing needs.

[0] http://www.partha.com/

Does 2,9 (or the forthcoming 2,10) have non-destructive editing yet?

It not, they can make all the other improvements they want, but Gimp will still be lagging a decade behind Photoshop.

2.9 and 2.10 is about moving completely over to GEGL, the new image processing engine that allows for things like high bit depth images, better color management, OpenCL image filters and Non-destructive editing. Unfortunately actually exposing the non-destructive editing parts in the application has been pushed back to 3.2 on the current road map.

Does Photoshop have an open source license yet?

If not, they can make all they want, but Photoshop will still be lagging 20 years behind GIMP.

See how silly that sounds?

The difference is that when I am sending files to the press, the press cares if I have sent CMYK, and they do not care if I have used an open-source program. Personally, I prefer to use open-source when I can, but if it doesn't do what I need to do, then the difference is not 'silly'. It's an obstacle.

You're absolutely right. OP picked an arbitrary feature though without telling how it affects the world around him and resorted to hyperbole. You actually have a point.

Almost no workflow involves Photoshop to press. It's Photoshop to some other application, like InDesign, exporting PDF then to press.

Likewise GIMP to Scribus, which can convert your RGB images to CMYK before producing the PDF.

While common, it's increasingly antiquated for printing companies to insist on CMYK. There are print standards that enable hand off of PDF for blind transfers where all content is defined in a device independent color space.

Not gonna matter if your printer can't print the color you used, which is a lot of them. You'll just be surprised when your prints come back looking like shit I guess.

They could print the color, they're just inept. There are amany printing companies around the world, even in the U.S., who can properly print properly prepared files, as I've described. And no doubt they'd like to have your business. The attachment to printing companies that do things wrong is why they continue to do things wrong rather than modernize.

Downvote me all you want, I did it for ten years and I know what I'm talking about. Take a couple illustrations in Photoshop and convert them from RGB to CMYK and look at what goes out of gamut and looks like shit. You can waste a ton of time going back and forth same-daying samples from the print shop, or you can use a tool that can do CMYK and can utilize the proper printer color profile and have a good idea of what you can do during the creation process.

If you want non-destructive editing of images, you'd use Nuke (or Natron if you want something OSS).

Darktable is now also an option for many tasks since they have a powerful mask manager and module duplication. Which makes the app sit somewhere in the middle between something like Lightroom and PS. While still being completely non-destructive.

Photoshop non-destructive? That's a good one. PS is less destructive than Gimp. But far, far away from a non-destructive app like the ones mentioned above.

Caveat: I am pro PS user. Since the time before it was called PS (Barneyscan) – aka ~25 years. And I have a BG in blockbuster VFX. An industry where image editing truly is non-destructive.

Oh, thanks! I hadn't heard of Natron but it looks pretty cool from the tutorial videos.

Out of curiosity, what is non-destructive editing of a digital image? I'm not familiar with the concept. Is it like some sort of infinite undo or what?

Short answer: yes. Long answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIS3pYeWr3g

As the OP, what I meant by "Non Destructive Editing' is the ability to go back and adjust mask/filters etc independently of each other and without permanently altering the original image. Photoshop does this with 'Adjustment Layers' which sit on top of the original image and apply things such as masks, colour adjustments, filters, etc to it.

Over-cooked one of your previous tweaks? Just open the corresponding adjustment layer and change the settings.

Wish you hadn't applied that filter 10 operations ago? Just switch off or delete that adjustment layer

Removed a bit of someone's ear while deleting the background? Just paint it back in on the mask layer

And if you really want to start over again, just delete all the adjustment layers and you're back to square one. The original image is untouched.

Someone disdainfully said I'd picked an "arbitrary feature" to complain about. For a professional designer [which I am] NDE is not just a "nice to have" feature, it's an essential one. Hence why Gimp will never be taken seriously by design professionals —no matter how many pointless icon themes it comes with.

Thanks for the in-depth response! Yes, it seems like a very useful feature to me. I don't see why GIMP can't have it, eventually.

Many comments here mention things like "Gimp should do this!" or "I'm waiting for years for feature X that <insert popular commercial product from Adobe> has had since forever!"

Well, people, this is open source: contrary to commercial products from Adobe, you can do it yourself and get all the features you want! Also, nobody is asking you to use GIMP; you're just welcome to make use of other people's hard work here.

Linux Airlines

When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do WHAT with the seat?"

Don't forget to mention it's all free and, if you have the skills to do so, you can build your seat any way you like ;)

Do you truly and honestly sense software quality as a hallmark of Linux? To me, Linux feels like a bucket of papercuts glued together with ... I don't know - something glueish.. I have tried loving Linux for the past 17 years, but I just can't muster the idealism anymore. I have gone back to Windows 7, which is rock stable.

I have to use Linux because I am an embedded developer, and all my clients want to use something free. Ok. But I develop in Windows because I can get stuff done. I limp along in the Linux environment, mounting sdcards and sticking thumbdrives into USB ports to copy files, which don't mount right unless you do it very carefully and wait for things to time out and take it out and try again ...

Love the simile. I am a human Linux-papercut entity with scars covering every inch of me, from months of struggling to do every single development task from symbolic debugging to editing to mounting storage to finding drivers for old well-supported devices that somehow never got Linux support. But its a living! I make good money papering over Linux's shortcomings for industrial clients. So its got that going for it.

You are comfortable with Windows as a dev environment, and that's fine. But consider that for many of us, it's like the mirror image of what you just said: I find the Windows environment painful to develop with, at least out of the box. Everything about Windows irks me. Linux (Ubuntu in my case, but there are many great distros) works as a dev environment almost out of the box for me. I never have problems mounting USB drives; most tools I use assume Linux by default, and it's usually their Windows version that's more buggy and/or hard to install. I know how to tune everything to my satisfaction, which I wouldn't know how to do with Windows.

Instead, every time I use Windows I get a papercut.

(To get this back on topic: I love and use GIMP, and I particularly love that a Free alternative to Photoshop exists, but I agree it's very complex and its interface is a mess).

Same experience here: in Linux everything I want works by default or I can configure it easily. In Windows I have to jump through a bunch of hoops with third party tools to get there.

I'm a developer though, for most people it doesn't really make a difference. It's just a matter of being used to something. My girlfriend liked Ubuntu a lot for the graphics (she asked me to install it after seeing me use Linux Mint and Debian for a year or so), but eventually switched back to Windows because a single website wouldn't work (some flash player thing, which Adobe stopped supporting) and she's just more used to working with Microsoft Office 2007, Windows Live Mail (or whatever they call it these days), and the general Windows 8.1 workflow.

Same for me with LibreOffice: I'm used to it now and in Microsoft Office (which is admittedly prettier) I have to search for every feature all over again.

I fully agree comfort is often a function of being used to something. I understand your girlfriend and think that, for her, it makes more sense to keep using Windows... for now! Also, MS Office is a killer feature of Windows, for users familiar with it or who must use it for work.

I've taken great pride at every person I've converted since 2010 that don't know Word's Ribbon interface, but can zoom through libreoffice. They use Word and complain. it's like WordPerfect all over again.

I also find Windows to be a painful environment to work in. All of my preferred tools are second-class citizens on Windows: vim, TeX, emacs, GCC, and pretty much anything that uses GTK or X11, really. The lack of a decent tiling WM slows me down considerably. If it weren't for Cygwin, I don't think I could get anything done in Windows.

I'm trying to think of a single thing that Windows has going for it, but I'm at a loss. I haven't had any driver issues on Linux in over 5 years at this point, and I don't play games, so I have literally no reason to use Windows except for the fact that it's what's supported on my employer's laptops.

I think JoeAltmaier’s dev experience is different because he’s an embedded developer. The embedded ecosystem is a disaster area. Proprietary forks of Eclipse, fragile build systems with closed-source modules, strange interfaces that don’t necessarily follow the USB specification properly, and drivers and documentation only for Windows.

I guess he’s also actively hostile to Linux for some reason. Mounting SD cards and USB drives is one thing that Linux is so much better at than Windows, where every USB drive needs its own permanent entries in the Registry. Except when the drive is hosting a modern Microsoft filesystem with its armada of active patents, but then you get a different bad experience than JoeAltmaier was describing.

Thanks for the insight - you are largely right.

I'm critical of Linux because I have wide experience on a variety of OS development environment over a number of releases. I've ported Linux kernel code and Windows network stack components; written desktop, embedded and mobile Windows, Linux and other more exotic OS drivers. I've seen what is available, what level of support for OS/kernel development exists. And I've formed strong opinions.

My current distaste derives from the fragile Ubuntu 14.04 auto-mount system that can get out of sync between the kernel mounts and the desktop representation. Put USB drives in and out too fast, and the desktop can show drives that are gone; can miss drives that are mounted; can even on occasion leave files in device folders that mask the mounted device so you copy Gbs of deployment data and it all goes into a file instead of on the media.

So I've earned every paper cut. They're not imaginary; I'm not so much 'actively hostile' as battle-weary.

Just to be clear, I didn't mean to discredit anything you said. I'm sure your papercuts aren't imaginary! And of course, I know nothing of embedded development, so I trust you're right in that space.

I was just pointing out that my experience (in a different problem space, admittedly!) is the exact opposite: I find Linux way better and more comfortable to work with than Windows.

OK, that’s fair. I don’t trust the Ubuntu automount system (in general, I don’t trust GUIs that can go out of sync with the underlying system, and I always have a terminal open), and I don’t plug and unplug drives quickly.

I've been using Linux (Well only Ubuntu and Fedora to be fair) without any kind of dual boot to Windows set up for like 5 years now. Before that, I always used to have a Windows installation along with the Linux OS. But as I started getting comfortable with Linux, I just didn't feel like booting up Windows. The only thing I miss is the availability and the performance of games on Linux machines. Also used to have driver issues when I started but almost everything works out of the box now. Currently on Ubuntu 16.04.

> Do you truly and honestly sense software quality as a hallmark of Linux?

Yes, but that reflects my experience. I use emacs, st, zsh, SBCL, Python, Go, Debian: the flakiest software I run is Firefox.

Others have a different experience. They use gedit, gnome-terminal, bash, Ubuntu: the most stable software they run is Firefox.

Windows, OTOH, is so bad that it tries to download OS updates as monolithic, multi-GB blobs instead of small package updates. This can be bad when one has insufficient hard drive space for the monolithic blob but plenty of space to install a few packages and update them.

Windows advertises to one. Debian doesn't. Windows tracks one's input. Debian doesn't. Windows is slow on old hardware. Debian isn't. Windows has a fairly crappy interface. Debian doesn't (whether default, or using one of the available replacement DEs/WMs).

> Windows has a fairly crappy interface. Debian doesn't (whether default, or using one of the available replacement DEs/WMs).

You clearly haven't tried using AfterStep ;)

Or FVWM2. or IceWM. or MacOS 9, or Windows XP PlayskoolOS.

But let's keep the comparisons to desktop environments made this decade. Enlightenment 0.17 GNOME3, KDE Plasma 5, etc. if you're using Mint's Debian Edition (and new converts should if they're too scared to try Calculate Linux), you're likely to boot into something relatively pretty the first time.

I didn't take "crappy interface" to mean "aesthetically unpleasing" (not to say that such isn't a valid interpretation or belief).

FVWM and IceWM, for example, might be ugly (though only by default -- I've seen pretty configurations of both), but I've always found them quite usable. AfterStep, though... * shiver *.

Linux Airlines.

Although there is a choice of 74 different types of fork for the in-flight meal, the pilot has an alarming tendency to crash into the side of mountains. When you point this out to fans of the airline you are told either;

1: The pilot is a volunteer. What do you expect?

2: At least with Linux Airlines you get to choose which type of fork you're holding, when you crash into a mountain!

3: If you don't like the way the pilot keeps crashing into mountains, why don't you fly the plane yourself?

...or just get another product that already does it. You have to be really hard up to want to diddle with every package you come across with shortcomings. And even if you do, then you have to struggle to get your changes pulled. Gotta be emotionally invested to go to the trouble.

If you are coming to do design work, odds are you don't equally possess the skills to code your own design tools.

I have to open a .psd three times a year and do not like to pay for PS for this or even install it, since I use Linux, so it would be great if the .psd handling would be further improved.

I really have no other wishes for Gimp aside from stability and performance:

- I learned the Gimp hotkeys first

- I know the menu structure around filters and so on is weird compared to PS, but I know it

- I like selecting, zooming and scrolling better in Gimp, somehow I have the feeling of more control and find it easier to make something pixel-perfect while getting sent non pixel-perfect .psds

- I like the old multi-window interface, even though it took me some time in the beginning to grasp it

- the text tool is fixed now

Maybe the only thing, which sounds interesting to me are the advanced and non-destructive layer options and transformations (or whatever these features are called in PS), but then again: I know my way around Gimp and if the PS layers were fully supported it would already be fine for me.

Edit: Have seen another comment about non-destructive editing and found out, that it is on the roadmap for 3.2 after GTK3 in 3.0. So my hopes are that this way the PS counterparts will be supported, too.

You can try Krita (www.krita.org) with PSD.

Gimp and Inkscape are the only free or open source graphics tools that have something resembling a secure download process.

Krita serves their website over https and the download over http from some mirror. Can't find any trace of a hash on their site either.

Why don't you use your distribution's packages manager to install it?

A relative was using MS Paint to draw some simple floor plan diagrams and asked whether there's any better tool available.

Gimp is actually overfeatured for what they need, but that was the only thing I found which I could install with a good enough certainty that I won't infect their computer with malware.

Gimp is actually not that good for drawing. I guess that if simplicity is needed, Paint.NET (www.getpaint.net) is a good option.

EDIT: I mean drawing geometrical stuff. Of course it's good for general drawing.

I strongly advise against Paint.NET. Besides the lack of download security they have huge "download" ads leading who knows where on the front page and a tiny download link.

They are knowingly using this dark pattern to make ad money which is too bad, because as you say the app is really good.

You could install it with Ninite?

Inkscape?

I ended up installing that too, but to be honest it's much too complicated and not exactly a good fit for floor plans.

I just remembered that there's also Dia (diagram editor), I might give that one a try.

I'm afraid I don't see that Gimp is any more suitable. Far less, actually.

Krita is not malware...

FWIW, files.kde.org does support HTTPS as well.

And if you press the details link you get all the info you could want:

    Filename: Krita-3.0-Alpha-master-e5109c2-x86_64.AppImage
    Size: 85M (88670208 bytes)
    Last modified: Mon, 11 Apr 2016 07:27:01 GMT (Unix time: 1460359621)
    SHA-256 Hash: 5d6574f750a188f67548d965ce6a8abd4d33479bc64f88130e545250e179a0e1
    SHA-1 Hash: bf969c7ce56aac754eb84a2123caa9cbf4174884
    MD5 Hash: ee0b82e82a98086dccad7f1344888a1c

The hashes only seem to be visible over http (no details link over https).

files.kde.org is also accessible over HTTPS (but use a package manager if possible).

While you're right, Krita publishes checksums for their downloads:

https://krita.org/en/item/krita-3-0-released/

Thanks, but I don't understand why they would put them in the release announcement instead of the download page. Everyone wanting to download this software will head straight to the download link and won't jave time to hunt for blog posts.

Also sha1 should be avoided nowadays, but at least it's not md5...

Good enough for verifying integrity in transit ("the line didn't mangle any bits"). Without a side channel, that's all the hashes are good for (if someone can get a rogue version on a site, they can also change the hashes displayed on the same site).

Well, the reason is that I went crazy from people mailing me "what are those numbers? what should I do with them? They are scary!!!" We had to make the download page as simple as possible -- and I still get mails from people who cannot figure out how to download Krita. Several, per week.

If you're the site maintainer please consider adding a link to the KDE https downloads or a link to the checksums somewhere on the download page, in the source code tab or even at the bottom.

I would say you're overly paranoid, but I do fear one day clicking on the wrong site.

That being said, we have to trust something.

I am not paranoid, the distribution security of most software projects is weak. It is feeble.

When I need to install something on Windows (be it drivers or apps), I keep marvelling: the process has remained identically crude for two decades, all the way since Win95: download some executable from any old website, no verification possible (yeah, there's a MD5 hash - on that same website), and hope it won't screw up the system (or at least not too much; btw there's no clean way to uninstall). Repeat step for step for every package, manually clicking through ten steps in the executable (where the only one that actually matters is the license - when was the last time you wanted to install somewhere else than C:\Program Files?).

Don't even think about "give me this, this, this, and this; check that it is the right version from a trusted source; make it so!" (PortableApps can do that, so it's demonstrably possible, even on Windows)

Progress? We don't need no steenking progress! Package managers are for lusers who prefer clicky GUIs over Glorious Hard Work and spelunking in the dark corners of the net! (How that ever got pushed as user-friendly?)

Well Windows 10 finally includes all the tools for package management out of the box. Now they just have to convince people to use them.

Wonderful!

AFAIK not for Win32 apps.

Out of the box PackageManager should support anything that can be packaged as an .msi file and it lets you write plug-ins to handle just about any other type of method for packaging and distributing apps.

At the moment it's however largely a case of Microsoft quietly developing a quite powerful tool and then going out of their way to not tell anybody about it. Microsoft has also not shown any interest in developing and supporting their own general software repo (I guess they don't want to compete with their app store). So we've basically got to wait for third party developers to fill the cap. Fortunately the people behind chocolaty are working on this and have said they'll have something ready by Summer 2016.

You need Chocolatey in your life: https://chocolatey.org

It's great if you're forced to used Windows as your development machine.

And soon Chocolatey will be seamlessly integrated with Windows 10 Package Management tools

What you're describing is either:

1. Chocolately (https://chocolatey.org/), which most people don't know about, or

2. The Windows Store, which I hope never catches on.

How is installing on linux any different when your One True Package Manager does not provide what you need? Usually it is "here use this third-party repository which is just some guy providing executables" or "build from source".

What's worse is when your One True Package Manager creates a broken package because the packager has no clue what they are doing. Debian and SSH ring any bells? Would using an exe provided by the developers have that problem?

Ah, the "but Linux sucks too" tactic! Of course it does, so does everything. In the past 10 years, I had to build from source about 50 times, and had 2 broken packages - while installing thousands (plus dependencies, not counting that). Not perfect - but way better than hunting for each and every single one.

On a side note, it is interesting how many incredible projects started from KDE (and how few survived or at least gained major traction): KMail, KDevelop, KOffice, not to mention Konqueror - KHTML / Webkit lives on, but Konqueror users are very rare. Does anyone know why this is happening?

Don't want to diminish KDE, but how is that incredible considering that for each of these there is a much more popular GTK or even Gnome project software?

Hmm, is there?

KHTML/WebKit: I don't think the GTK/Gnome folks ever wrote a browser engine. KDevelop: Did the GTK/Gnome folks ever write a significant IDE with a code model? Krita: It's focused on painting/illustration and doesn't directly complete with Gimp. Among artists doing this Krita is likely more popular than Gimp now, since the latter isn't even in the running. (Support for MyPaint brushes is progress on that front, though painters want many other features.)

For KMail/Kontact there's Evolution, but arguably neither ever became really popular if you compare them to, say, Thunderbird.

I think it's because Qt has traditionally had a pretty weird dual- or tri-licensing model: https://www.qt.io/faq/#_Toc453700684 which resulted in less adoption by developers because of the viral nature of the GPL.

IIRC, it used to be that even the core Qt libs were GPL (unless you paid for a commercial license), while now most (but still not all) libs are also available under the LGPL.

GTK has always been plain LGPL 2. Nothing scary.

Don't forget Reconq web broswer. It was pretty faster compared against Firefox and Chrome, and was using WebKit. Sadly, died...

There is still FUD about the licensing, decades on. And a lot of Linux vendors make Gnome the default - perhaps partly because it's less configurable and so easier to support, but partly it does seem to be this weird prejudice. I wonder whether it's a US/EU thing - most of KDE seems to be developed in the EU and the major European distros (which is only really SuSE these days now that Mandriva doesn't exist any more) seem to have it as default, whereas the American distros seem to prefer Gnome.

KDE is resource hog. And it segfaults pretty often. I used it for year, but I'm returning to something GTK based. (not GNOME, of course)

Not my experience at all (except on Ubuntu, which seem to somehow mess up all their KDE packages)

It's slowly coming back. Wireshark used QT in its latest release. Some people are switching back due to GTK3, which is...eh...just eh.

What about paying the GIMP guys then?

Definitely. It would be awesome if they would use something like bountysource.com or any other way to pay directly for developer time, even better so if you can specify a broad project you want to support. I like how pypy is doing it.

At the moment their donations page says, that you can support some conference. While it is a nice way to give something back, it is not a cause that gets me excited about donating or telling others to donate.

As a photographer, Lightroom changed everything for me. The need for Photoshop was suddenly close to nil. Now I try to fire up Affinity Photo whenever I would have fired up PS.

As an open source alternative to LR I can really recommend Darktable. In many ways it is even more powerful than LR, but the usability and raw conversion engine sometimes lacks. Noise reduction and color handling is not quite up to par with LR.

Agreed on both Lightroom and Darktable. I'm finding I actually prefer Darktable's UI, and the fact that there's a manual which describes what all the tool parameters do places them a step above a lot of open source programs.

Real photographer, old shool photographer, don't edit the picture after, if you need to edit it it's was not a good picture :-)

Tell that to Ansel Adams. Or is he not old school enough for you?

Yeah, Ansel was actually kind of famous for the way he would produce different versions of famous images over the years.

Then, of course, there were guys like Jerry Uelsmann, doing 'photoshop' effects in a darkroom equipped with 14 enlargers.

Most of what you'd want to do with Darktable is more akin to developing your picture, rather than editing it.

Look at it this way: your camera captures a lot more information than a JPG can hold. Either you let the camera decide which bits to keep, or you shoot RAW and use a tool like Darktable to help you decide for yourself.

And because I know what my tooling is capable of, I can tweak the first stage (setting up the camera to capture the image) bearing in mind the way I want to process it, to get a better picture than I'd otherwise be able to take in that context.

Of course, I could also set up the camera to have the right levels of saturation, sharpening etc. before taking the picture, but the camera controls aren't nearly as fine-grained and I don't have time while shooting to tweak and re-shoot every image several times.

That's a common misconception. People always manipulated photos. From the very beginning. It just was more constrained and required a different set of [technical] skills when it was still done in a darkroom, using multiple exposures or even working on the negative directly.

http://petapixel.com/2013/09/12/marked-photographs-show-icon...

The photo itself is a manipulation of what you're actually seeing. You play with your f/iso/speed to get what you want. So long as you haven't lost any data (over/underexposed), you can further develop it in Lightroom. If you're capturing in RAW, this is an essential part of the process.

So your argument is you limit your manipulation to just the camera, with its crappy screen and limited ability to show you color calibrations.

There is something to say about that as an art form. Some people use pin-hole cameras. Some people still use film. That's fine if that's what you're going for. But just because you load a photo into software doesn't mean you're editing it any more than just flipping those settings on your camera.

What a silly comment.

By that criteria Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and just about every famous photographer ever are not "real photographers".

It's even more silly with regard to digital photography because raw sensor data is just a bunch of numbers that have to be interpreted and converted to an image somehow. There's no such thing as an unprocessed digital photograph. Either a person is shooting RAW and tweaking the conversion themselves, or the camera is doing it behind the scenes using a preset interpretation of the raw data.

Are you serious? Photographers have been manipulating pictures in the dark room since forever!

>>Real photographer, old shool photographer, don't edit the picture after, if you need to edit it it's was not a good picture :-)

I guess you're too young to have ever worked in a 'real' 'old skool' darkroom then?

Where do you think the phrases like "mask" and "burn in" that your graphics software uses came from?

You might enjoy this rant: https://bitbucket.org/WAHa_06x36/old-xee/src/fe1cec107972603...

I guess, that's what you get for supporting a file format through the years in a backwards-compatible manner.

But I also believe, that over the time technical debt like this is a huge advantage for the company, because it fences off competitors entering the domain through integration.

Another example is the Adobe PDF spec. In my opinion a thoroughly overdesigned document structure where it's nearly impossible to implement every possible way of positioning an element. Trust me, i've seen alot of differently produced PDFs and it feels like each one of them is a unique snowflake.

The only one who profits is Adobe which provides the only Reader supporting every feature imaginable...

Adobe's new subscription model for Photoshop, makes it expensive for non-professionals. GIMP looks more attractive now for occasional photo editing.

For Inkscape and GIMP to be a good alternative for Adobe's apps, I think they need to improve on UI a lot. I wonder if there is any umbrella organization which can look after FOSS Design apps like GIMP, Inkscape, Krita etc.

> I think they need to improve on UI a lot.

This seems to apply to the majority of FOSS projects.

Adobe's subscription model certainly excluded a segment of their previous userbase. But some people are more interested in Affinity Designer and Photo than Inkscape and GIMP, despite them being closed source. Designer is available in beta for Windows now, and Photo should be released this fall.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/windows/

Maybe they can start a kickstarter campaign to get funds for it. I'm pretty sure that a better UI would attract a lot of users that now hesitate between using Photoshop or GIMP.

For preexisting OSS, I think it is difficult to get a successful Kickstarter campaign because they cannot really sell something for pledges. Have there been any successful Kickstarter FOSS projects ?

I think Bountysource is better here but for mega issues like UI redesign or GTK3 port etc a campaign may be the right way to go.

Have there been any successful Kickstarter FOSS projects ?

Diaspora was successful in the sense that it got lots of money. It was slightly less successful in delivering on its promises.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-2016-lets-m...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-free-paint-...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-open-source...

Though the reasons it worked for us don't really apply to the Gimp situation.

Found this http://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#arent-you-interested-i...

Turns GIMP developers encourage private campaigns focussed on developing specific features.

Another good article on current state of GIMP: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/gimp-is-20-years-ol...

http://blog.en.uptodown.com/gimp-20-years/

There is https://freedomsponsors.org/project/130/GIMP

But the platform selection was probably wrong - a lot of people probably was distracted by it.

What platform selection? It's not even remotely related to anyone in the team.

This was https://freedomsponsors.org/issue/78/add-other-samplers-that...

And it worked well enough for this guy. He did as much as he could in the timeframe that he had.

Note that he's not core team member. It was a personal fundraiser.

Adobe's photographer's suite (or something like that), which includes PhotoShop and LightRoom is around ~10$/month. I do not think it's that expensive, as you would need to subscribe for 3-4 years, before you pay same amount as for older versions of PhotoShop.

Yes there are cheaper alternatives from affinity of pixelmator, but from photography's point of view PS + LR are still one of the best, feature rich and user friendly tools for photography.

>Adobe's new subscription model for Photoshop, makes it expensive for non-professionals. GIMP looks more attractive now for occasional photo editing.

As opposed to its $800+ asking price before that? It's now $10 per month for Photoshop and Lightroom, so $120 per year.

The biggest turn off for me about Adobe products is that they certainly used to charge me more (almost twice as much at one point) for exactly the same product that they were selling in the USA.

When what you're buying is a download from the same server, with the same internationalisation and features, that sticks in your throat a bit.

When good enough (for me) competition became available in the form of Pixelmator and Affinity I stopped using Adobe products completely.

Things might be better with the subscription pricing but I don't want to be dependent on Adobe again. For my business I could always claim the price back as an expense, it's more the principle of not tolerating gouging.

IMHO no other US company has been as bad at price gouging EU customers as Adobe.

> IMHO no other US company has been as bad at price gouging EU customers as Adobe.

They gouged Australians even worse!

http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/it-is-cheaper-to-fly...

Upgrade price for Photoshop alone was a lot less. And you could run it for years (forever[1] in fact, if you count emulation), as a lot of people did.

[1] Latest New Yorker Cover was Created in Photoshop 3.0 on Mac OS 7 (http://gizmodo.com/5059533/latest-new-yorker-cover-was-creat...)

Desktop software can hardly compete with commercial offerings if its developers don't get properly funded.

Paying for consulting services, donations, books and trainings isn't enough for a monthly salary.

The monthly subscription option for Photoshop ended my occasional tinkering with Gimp. When I need it, I buy it for a month ($30) and get done what I need to get done. It really doesn't need to save me much time to pay for itself.

Funny how people who prefer Photoshop always have to show up and take a dump on GIMP just because it doesn't meet their expectations. I don't particularly like Photoshop and haven't used it in nearly a decade, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I think it's bad software.(though I'm not a fan of Adobe's practices)

If GIMP is ever going to support the desires of professional designers, it's going to have to be developed by designers. Maybe I'm wrong, but I am willing to bet that the people who actively use and develop GIMP are people with programming experience who are doing some digital imaging on the side that doesn't require things like CMYK or high bit depth. GEGL and GIMP have been in development for a long time now, but have advanced in areas that the user base cares about, but not necessarily in areas that professionals care about. Simple as that.

If you really hate Photoshop, learn Scheme and contribute to GIMP and GEGL.

I do want to comment on the non-destructive editing feature; I feel like that's also a serious designer convenience, but it's never been something that I have personally desired. In fact, I wouldn't really want it, I think. In other software packages that have similar non-destructive capabilities, like Maya, the "history" of an object becomes more and more cumbersome over time. Maybe this doesn't happen in Photoshop, IDK. To be honest, I'm perfectly fine duplicating layers are "backups" before deciding on the right look.

I'm certainly not a professional designer but I worked doing quite a bit of graphics work in a previous life and relied heavily on Photoshop to the point that I've, personally, purchased several licenses since version 3.0, though my most recent is CS. I no longer even have it installed anywhere. You're probably right. Most of the developers of GIMP are developers first and probably don't have a perfect understanding or hold the requirements of the design world as highly as a professional designer would, but many of the people who use Photoshop also don't fall within these stringent categories yet most of them will similarly "take a dump on GIMP."

The last several times I've had to do graphics work I've used GIMP and taken the time to learn how to do the (now much more limited) things I needed to do using its workflow. I'm perfectly happy with it and relatively convinced that if I had to be doing serious image editing work, I'd be able to do so in GIMP.

So when people talk about how they prefer Photoshop, I believe there are a few reasons and all of them have little to do with GIMP being inferior as a product and much more to do with pure preference (emacs vs vi, style):

1. A large number of people are very well trained in every corner of Photoshop's workflow. The frustration factor is much higher for these folks because they're not having to learn something new, they're not expecting it to take a while to do things, they're expecting to be able to be as capable in GIMP as they are in Photoshop having never learned how GIMP works. My first experience with this was moving a selection while I was still making it -- something I do constantly -- hold space in PS and drag. That doesn't work that way in GIMP.

The closest analogue I can think of to learning Photoshop was when I broke down and decided to learn Vim - I remember being overwhelmed at how much information I had to keep in mind just to do basic tasks - command permutations, keys that didn't seem similar to any other product and the like. Photoshop is hellishly complex[0] in this manner. Being a GUI product for image editing, I think this surprises people when they dive in. Needless complex? Perhaps in some places, but much of the complexity is necessary.

2. There's seventy tutorials for every kind of manipulation you might want to do in Photoshop. There's sometimes not even one in GIMP. Many people have grown used to finding quick answers for how to do common things in Photoshop due to the wealth of resources available and get frustrated when they can't find the equivalent in GIMP. This adds to the perception that GIMP is inferior - "Everyone uses Photoshop, see all the tutorials?"

Between versions 3 and 4, I had purchased several $100+ books, subscribed to print magazines at $99.00/yr and spent countless hours learning how to be productive in the tool. The variety of tutorials out there serve to make learning the product a little harder since you can follow a handful of steps to get the desired effect without understanding enough about it to produce a similar effect using the tools from the walk-through.

[0] Try explaining how to use the Pen tool to someone who's never encountered it or something similar. You start by describing its purpose, the variety of ways it can be used, showing examples, then explaining how to manipulate each of the points using a variety of CTRL+ALT clicks. Oops, you dragged the point when you meant to change the orientation of the curve. Wrong key.

Nice to know that they're working on better HiDPI support. GTK 3 for some reason has two separate HiDPI settings, but one of them only supports integer scaling factors. Additionally, there is no way to specify different factors for each monitor. If you have two monitors with different densities, a GTK window will always have the wrong scaling on one of them.

Qt 5 gets this right. The only frustrating thing there is how many applications still use Qt 4… (same applies to GTK 2, I guess)

Yea I hate that about GTK. IntelliJ just uses the DPI setting you set in xrandr for the display. That way I can run IntelliJ remotely over ssh and it still shows up with the right DPI on both a 4k and non-4k monitor without needing to change the settings.

Looking forward to Gimp 2.9.4 on Windows. I've been using development (2.9.3) versions lately on Win10 and working pretty well. The recent changes will be be quite useful assuming everything works as advertised. UI improvements will be welcome particularly if making Gimp integrate better with Win10 overall.

One of the issues I've had with Gimp on Windows is pen support, though the Wacom pen on the Surface Pro 2 has been iffy anyway. Pen use is worse though with Gimp, Inkscape vs. MS apps, but with some luck the new Gimp version will do better.

> On Linux, GIMP is now capable of using darktable for pre-processing raw images from DSLRs (Canon CR2, Nikon NEF etc.).

Since Darktable is also workflow tool, I'm pretty curious about how well these two are integrated. For example, if I prepare a whole batch of photos in DT without exporting them, is GIMP smart enough to import the files with those settings automatically?

I really wish I could get into using GIMP but after a lifetime of Photoshop usage I just find the interface and shortcuts really clunky! There used to be Gimpshop to change the keybindings to match photoshop's - is there anything like that anymore?

To answer my own question - I found this: http://www.webupd8.org/2014/02/gimp-get-photoshop-like-keybo...

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-make-the-gimp-work-more-like-ph...

I'm using Paint.NET on Windows and I really like it - It satisfies all my needs.

When I switched to Mac, I was searching for something similar, but in the end decided to use Gimp. However, the thing is just incredibly slow. I have MBP 13 Retina and it takes 6 seconds to apply simple "bucket fill" on an image 3000x4500. Is this normal?

Gimp does seem to slow down a lot if an operation would affect a lot of pixels. That's a 13.5 megapixel image, if you're editing a 5MP image, full-canvas operations are much faster. But also, try zooming in on your new 13.5MP image and using a reasonably sized brush, say 20.0 (px?) to paint on it - it's pretty responsive. But if you switch to a gigantic, 200 (px?) brush, it gets a bit laggy (but still fraction-of-second laggy, not multi-second laggy, at that scale).

I haven't used any of these heavily, but they come up often. Over the past few years I've heard a lot of good things about Krita[1] as an alternative to Gimp. I've found both Pixelmator[2] and Acorn[3] to have enough of the features to replace Photoshop for basic needs.

[1] https://krita.org/en/download/krita-desktop/ [2] http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/ [3] http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

Add Affinity Photo to that mix too. It won Apple's Best App Of 2015 award, and is made by Serif (who have a long history of developing photo software, especially on Windows). I have Photoshop CC too, but I use Affinity Photo more often now due to its speed. And as a Photoshop plugin developer, I'm really happy with its strong support for Photoshop plugins - it actually seems more compatible than some versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/

Krita is a great program, but it's designed for digital painting rather than image manipulation.

I also have 13" rMBP. With Pixelmator app filling a 3000x4500 with a solid color, or even a gradient, is nearly instant.

Great to see a new release on the 2.9.x branch. I've been using the unofficial McGimp builds[0] for a year or so and I can highly recommend them (if only because there are no official Mac OS X builds from the GIMP team).

[0] http://www.partha.com/

For those on Linux there have been xdg-app/flatpak nightlies available for a while: http://flatpak.org/apps.html including the GTK+3 version.

They're highly usable but of course care must be taken with changes in the native format.

Edit: typos.

GIMP stuck on Mac at times. Hope this version be better. Thanks for sharing!

I have used Gimp for many years now. I ditched Photoshop a long time ago.

The one feature I am looking forward to for editing in this release is the Select remove holes feature.

Having to expand, contract, and feather selections to remove the small holes caused by a color select with a threshold value was a real pain.

Ever since I switched from Photoshop to Gimp, I have desperately waiting for non-destrutive editing aka adjustment-layers / filter-layers. It has been years now...

So I was excited to see a new version. Checked the features and ... nope.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

non-destructive editing is officially planned for 3.2 at the moment, so you can take a break from looking at new versions and crossing your fingers.

But don't hold your breath either...

Find a developer with spare time who uses GIMP and sell this feature to him.

Yeah, because any random developer who uses GIMP is also an experienced C developer that can hack graphics code?

And also his changes to your specs will be welcomed by the GIMP core team...

Although I'm happy with all the fuzz that this gimp release brings, I feel sad because Krita (another excellent graphics software, also available and better supported in windows than gimp IMO) didn't have this much attention. Still I feel happy that a lot of open source projects are becoming powerful enough to replace its commercial counterparts. I hope that more people start using it and the developers get better funding and can support these software better.

Good to see. I am on Linux all the time now. The one pain point I have from moving away from OSX is photo editing. I used the Preview program for really fast photo cropping, color correction, etc. it took me close to zero time to edit a photo.

On Linux, it feels like I am running through mud when I use Gimp. I need to invest the time to simplify my workflow, obviously.

They still have that terrible multi-window mode set as default, or they finally changed it to usable single-window?

They changed it a long time ago.

Every time I install gimp fresh (lately that's happened on ubuntu and windows) it defaults to multi-window mode.

Thankfully, multi-window mode still exists (dito for Inkscape). I have no idea why one could find single-window more usable? The only reason I can imagine would be using Gimp on a single small display (e.g. subnotebook class).

I do subjectively find single-window apps more usable, and think they are objectively more approachable. Talk from yesterday on a thread about the Skype UI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12086898

Thanks for the link! I think it's not really possible to derive general conclusions, regardless of the app in question, though. Compared to Gimp or Inkscape, Skype is a different class of application.

From my personal experience, most people doing graphics usually have a multiple monitor setup. That alone rules out Gimp's single window mode for me.

Totally agreed that Skype is a different beast than Gimp/Inkscape.

Putting aside the discussion on Skype, I was answering your "I have no idea why one could find single-window more usable" from my point of view, that is, a newbie user doing the occasional edit/filter/crop.

For such a casual use case, yes I find the single-window mode more usable.

Completely different usecase. In GIMP you often need to have several images open. Side by side. With separate windows you can position them in any way you want. With a single window you need to have them opened in separate tabs and switch back and forth? Pointless.

What's "objectively more approachable" for one application, makes zero sense for another.

For your use case, I have no doubt :) . For my casual editing needs, though, I'm happy with a simple(r) single-window mode. Nowhere to get lost, everything in one place.

This problem was solved decades ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface

When you alt-tab to the application, all of the child windows come to the foreground. You don't have to alt-tab 4 times to bring all of the various windows forward individually.

Because I go to edit my image and the tool dialog has disappeared behind something.

I select windows with alt-tab and I can assure you that multi-window mode in gimp is a nightmare.

Try alt-` (on Linux, that is)

from gimp i would really love to see a great in-app-tutorial to get new users up to speed. it would make it much more competitive with its illustrious closed source rival if people knew how to do things.

Note this is a developer edition.

I just went to the download page to find out this is not a stable version.

But, as the page says: "GIMP 2.9.4 is quite reliable for production work, but there are still loose ends to tie"

Great news, I've been using GIMP/Inkscape for a long time. Could someone list open source, (and especially Linux) alternatives and how they compare to GIMP, Inkscape as of 2016 July?

I suppose Krita[0] might be one of the most interesting alternatives. But Krita is more optimised for drawing with a tablet than anything else. Someone who uses Krita a lot has pointed out to me that Krita isn't as good at text handling as GIMP is, for instance.

[0] https://krita.org/en/

> Krita isn't as good at text handling as GIMP is

It must be very, very bad at text handling then.

I believe text handling is one target of this years kickstarter campaign

Krita might be of interest to you as they try to increasingly unite vector drawing (SVG basd) with pixel art.

http://www.peppercarrot.com/de/article265/svg-experimentatio...

I've been using Inkscape for years, but not GIMP.

Pinta Image Editor (open source for Linux, BSD, Mac, Windows) finally works reasonably well as an alternative. For years, Pinta crashed resizing an image larger than the screen, and did annoying things like adding the markers from a selection area to the image itself. Those bugs were finally fixed this year. It doesn't have as many bells and whistles as Photoshop or GIMP, but the user interface is entirely graphical and straightforward.

You'll have to compare yourself, but http://alternativeto.net/software/gimp/?license=opensource&p...

> A build for Mac OS X is not available at this time.

I really love the part "Statistics on Our Awesome Contributors" in this article, I wish to see that more on oper source releases.

I think such a big revamp of the app would have been an ideal moment to finally change the name to something less disabled hostile.

I see you're getting downvoted, but I agree with you. The name does hold it back IMO. When I read the name the first thought is gimp in the BDSM sense. Does have an effect on how much I promote it.

For the 87% of the world population that is not native English speaking, Gimp just means nothing, except a fine image manipulation program...

(and we had to Google for BDSM. It does not seem to be a BSD Unix variant... and now that I think about it: it might be the reason why FreeBSD is not so popular!)

Not only I'm pretty sure that there is an Indic / Chinese language spoken by hundreds of milions people, where Inkscape is a bad word...

Also -- even if in my eyes it's a bit childish from the Gimp team to stick to what seems to be perceived as a bad name -- i perceive as even more childish that people keep on complaining that an acronym means something "bad" in their language.

Next time you come to the south of Switzerland, I'll invite you for a joyful train ride from Locarno to Domodossola: http://www.centovalli.ch/?lang=EN

> "i perceive as even more childish that people keep on complaining that an acronym means something "bad" in their language"

I don't usually complain about it, I'm just being honest about it having an effect on how much I promote it. In other words, I talk about it less because of its name. I also doubt I'm the only one. You can paint this as irrational if you want, but if the idea is to promote a free alternative to Photoshop (which makes Gimp a very useful project for the open-source community) it seems a little off to reduce its popularity over something as simple to change as the name.

> but if the idea is to promote a free alternative to Photoshop

For the GIMP team it isn't.

On top of the commitment to free software, the Gimp website says:

"Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. You can further enhance your productivity with GIMP thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins."

Their goal seems to be a good tool, not an alternative to any other software.

And it works well for me! Thanks Gimp.

> Their goal seems to be a good tool, not an alternative to any other software.

Precisely :)

Yes, of course it stands up on its own merits, but in practice what makes it useful to the broader open-source movement is as a tool that fills the same gap that Photoshop does.

It's just like LibreOffice/OpenOffice, of course these tools stand on their own merits too, but again the reason they're important to the open source movement, i.e. what makes them useful in promoting open-source, is that they fill the same gap in the market as Microsoft Office.

Speaking generally, the approach to pushing open-source in practical way is to build open-source tools that cover the key functionality that commercial software offers (as well as functionality that commercial software doesn't yet offer) in order to provide people with less of a reason not to switch.

In other words, Gimp is an "alternative to Photoshop" when framing it as part of the open-source movement (which is what I had implied with my earlier comment). This is not the only framing that can be applied.

I think he got downvoted not because he said that the name holds Gimp back, but because he made it sound like a political issue, which it is absolutely not.

I hope you are not programming. Sub, DOM, Switch, LaTex are all "dirty" words then :)

Those all could mean other things, Gimp afaik only has a "dirty" meaning. I've never liked mentioning it and always wondered why they'd stick with a name like that.

It's a bit out of balance. If the context is not specifically about sexuality, then I doubt it can cause any trouble. Languages are full of words with double meaning.

> "If the context is not specifically about sexuality, then I doubt it can cause any trouble."

It's not about causing trouble, it's about something that ends up detracting from the project. Imagine if someone released an IRC client called Dildo, would you expect some backlash about the name choice?

For a chat app, maybe. If it's a tinder style app for nerds, no problem :) But it can be a good name for some other app. It's even a good idea to generate some vitality.

Khmmm :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12102718

It's also BDSM hostile then. Who will stand for the gentle BDSM crowd against those hippies? :)

What does gimp mean then? Looking in an online dictionary, it says something about a flat braid or round cord. Looking at google images, I see the GNU Image Manipulation Program. How does gimp relate to BDSM (as other comments mention)?

> "How does gimp relate to BDSM"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bondage_suit

From the page: "A bondage suit, also commonly called a gimp suit"

Ah, I see.

This is great news. I have used GIMP on and off for more than 10 years now. The new UI changes seem to be exciting. As the other comment noted it seems that official build for OS X is not out yet. Last time I had checked GIMP on OS X, there were lots of UX issues. Hopefully this new release has improved the things.

On a slightly unrelated note, as a front-end developer only 2 things have stopped me from using Linux full time.

1. Lack of Photoshop on Linux

I know Adobe tried a few years ago and didn't have enough sales for the Linux version to justify the development and maintenance costs.

I have used GIMP 2.8 on Linux. The filters and effects and the UX in general didn't justify using it as the only tool in production. Also it seems that GIMP development has happened at a very slow pace for past 5-6 years. In fact, off the top of my head, I can't seem to remember a new exiting feature to it for a long time.

There are a few other Mac only low end alternatives like, Acorn, PixelImator and Affinity Photo. Last time I tried Acron. Wasn't impressed. Planning to give Affinity Photo a shot this year. Sketch seems to be picking up as the UX tool of choice but it is also Mac only. I think most of the product makers in this category seem to think, if you are a professional you can get yourself a Mac. However, Apple likes to charge a lot of premium for its products, which puts its products out of range for lots of junior developers and smaller companies in developing economies like India.

2. Lack of MS office on Linux (This is not really that critical these days, just a good to have.)

This not really needed for development. But lots of non-technical people use MS Office for documents and specifications. So as a professional it's just easier to get a MS license. And now on subscription model it's quite affordable.

I still wish google will release Google Docs as a fully offline product. Something like Google Docs packed as Electron based app will make it more usable for people in India, where always on connectivity is still an issue in major parts of the Country.

I haven't used Windows as my main machine for 8 years now. I use a Mac mainly because it gives a stable Unix-like OS with good enough UX. Have waited for Desktop Linux to happen for 16 years now. It has been in "quite close but not there yet" status for past 4-5 years now. But don't know how long this phase is going to last for Linux Desktop.

I do traditional and digital drawing. With GIMP 2.9.2 Photoshop was no longer better for drawing on a tablet (ATIV).

Haven't looked back since.

What do you need from an office suite that LibreOffice doesn't give you? Not being snarky, genuine question.

LibreOffice is still poor at interoperability with MS Office – if everyone you're working with is using MS Office and you have to edit their documents without breaking formatting, or want to use their templates, your only safe bet is using MS Office. Ideally in the same version and on the same OS, there's also breakage when moving files between the OSX and Windows builds of the same MS Office version.

Then there's macros. Yeah, yeah, people shouldn't use them, but they do, and when LibreOffice crashes on particularly weird ones while MSO Just Works™… well. (Yesterday I came across a particularly fun example: 100kb data wrapped into 30 megabytes worth of macros that all did exactly nothing, but were part of the client's default template, and so in every file they send out. LibreOffice hangs when trying to parse them, even when disabled, Excel works.)

Edit: Why the downvotes? I answered the question. Disagreeing with facts doesn't make them disappear.

Excel spreadheet file format (as well as other Office file formats) is horrible, especially slightly older ones. I wouldn't expect the LibreOffice ever to really master those. One blog post to about the file formats: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

I don't care whether it's Microsoft's or LibreOffice's fault. It doesn't change the fact that I'm forced to use Microsoft Office.

I agree with the parent, interoperability is not perfect, and I don't understand why the comment deserved to be downvoted.

As creshal pointed out, it has mainly been the formatting issues for me. Nested bullets and lists, which are a lot of times part of specifications, didn't use to work well in OO / LibreOffice till 3-4 years (That's when I just resigned and started using MS Office, also it helped that I was able to afford it by then.) ago. Even in their own formats. When imported from MS office, there were even further problems.

Placements of images and use of complicated formatting options in tables was also a problem. Quite a few Business Analysts are quite good with these advanced options in MS Office, as it's the main tool they use. It reflects in their documents. :-)

Re: Google Docs Offline -- this has actually been available for a while: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/6388102?co=GENIE.Plat.... It's not packed up with an installer as a desktop app, but the Chrome Apps can be configured to work fully-offline, and will sync changes when online.

Just enabled it. Thanks for the tip!

I looking into getting around basic photography editing. Is Gimp good enough or should I spring on Pixelmator/Affinity Photo(can't afford Adobe CC)?

Oh man it's already been 16 years since Grokking the GIMP[0]

[0] http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html?Grokking_the_GIMP.html

Does Gimp has support for display with high pixel density?

Wow, they now have a new GTK+ builtin theme! This will sure crush Photoshop.

Besides non-destructive editing, decent CMYK support is still missing. But as others have said, they do seem to move in that direction. Maybe Gimp 3 will be usable for real work.

Remove Holes from selections

I dont know about other but this is going to be a big leap forward for sure

I really wish there was an open alternative to Photoshop. Unfortunately, Gimp isn't.

I fell like printing will be irrelevant/obsolete before Gimp offers proper CMYK support

Ctrl-F'd the thread to find this.

Gimp, no matter its merits, will never be taken seriously as a Photoshop alternative by designers until it has rock-solid CMYK support. Even though most designers I know, myself included, are desperate to get out from Adobe's grip.

As an aside, I recently led the switch in our studio from Photoshop to Sketch: the designers were literally bouncing in their chairs for joy as they realised how much better it was.

But sketch also doesn't support CMYK, does it? Otherwise people wouldn't need tricks like https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/creating-resume-in-ske...

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