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Comment by miduil | Hacker News Reader

GIMP initially started as an university project, that, by now, has been developed for almost 20 years. Just in the past seven days there've been 9305 LOC additions and 3535 deletions, according to the github mirror [0].

It's one of the most important projects for the open source desktop, for example GTK (formerly GIMP Toolkit) is one very important outcome.

Please support GIMP, because it's more than 'just' a Photoshop alternative.

[0]: https://github.com/GNOME/gimp/compare/master@%7B1507386622%7...

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> It's one of the most important projects for the open source desktop, for example GTK (formerly GIMP Toolkit) is one very important outcome.

Is it? GTK/Gnome was created over a historical footnote and to this day is more of a hindrance than helpful overall. It effectively bisected the entire Linux desktop community and caused so much time lost with downstream application developers.

GIMP is obtuse to use and provides an UX that has been out of touch for many years. It doesn't support features that are just bog-standard in other products, for years. (Like >8 bit colour). It is exactly the kind of amateurish project that gave FOSS GUIs their bad reputation.

Gimp is the only free alternative to photoshop that actually measures up feature wise. That its UI doesn't exactly mirror Adobe's isn't a negative. Many of Gimp's differences (key shortcuts to paste into a new image or drag and drop resizable select boxes, etc) are things that I never realized I wanted in an image editor until I made the switch.

It doesn't have to mirror Photoshop, but the UX has to be good. With Gimp, it's not. People can claim all they want that Gimp is fine (after getting used to using it), but there's a clear voice in the public that Gimp's UX is terrible.

I used to hear people complaining more about the UI before the single window mode became available. Nowadays I hear few complaints about the UI. That isn't to say it's perfect, but I get the impression people have other concerns now.

I definitely agree, the single window mode is way better.

I’ve used multiple image editors for 25 years and the UI is fine, meaning good enough.

And yet here many of us are, satisfied with using it daily and supporting it. You would do well not to project your experiences and use cases on everybody else.

Satisfied doesn't mean things are great. People were satisfied with taxis until Uber came along and showed people a better way. There's always a better way!

Great by whose definition? I think that GIMPs UX is more than sufficient for what it is. It certainly doesn't "give FOSS GUIs their bad reputation".

It's okay if GIMP's UX doesn't suit your tastes. It suites others just fine.

I'm surprised at the commit rate considering how glacial the pace of development seems from a user perspective. Every stable release in the past five years has been strictly bugfixes.

I think there's been a big rewrite in development for ages and the stable releases aren't seeing a lot of the new changes.

This seems like a major development anti-pattern, especially considering their nightly builds are good enough to use. They need to get over their perfectionism and start putting out releases again.

> it's more than 'just' a Photoshop alternative.

Can you elaborate on that? With Photoshop being relatively cheap to use only when I need it, I have a hard time supporting an Open Source tool that never seems to meet my needs. What am I missing?

Photoshop, along with other Adobe software, now uses a subscription based model which users may not be able to justify, unless they're a student or professional constantly using it and recouping the cost.

Adobe also links all of your software and access to your data with a single account password which the company has proven incapable of managing securely.

So those are two good reasons to use Gimp - no recurring fees and no worries about the cloud. Although the best reason not to use Gimp, albeit an unfair one from Gimp's point of view (but still relevant,) is the degree of lock-in to proprietary Adobe formats and tools that pervades the graphics, editing and design professions.

>I have a hard time supporting an Open Source tool that never seems to meet my needs. What am I missing?

Simply having a decent, free alternative to Photoshop should be worth something.

> Adobe also links all of your software and access to your data with a single account password which the company has proven incapable of managing securely.

I’m not defending the Creative Cloud model, but you don’t have to save your data in the cloud. It’s just like how Apple has iCloud and Microsoft has OneDrive. Sure, you can save your data in the cloud, but you don’t have to.

Nowadays there are great alternatives such as Affinity Photo.

I've met a good deal of digital artists that use GIMP exclusively - I think this is in part because Photoshop has always been out of many people's budgets and even more so since they've moved to a subscription-based service. Choices are then down to illegal copies or using open-source software, of which GIMP is generally considered the Photoshop competitor. If anything, I like the program because it brings such things to a much larger portion of the population than photoshop ever can with their price model.

It seems to have a larger learning curve and some things are add-ons, but a few things work differently or not as well. I think this is the main drawback, and probably what you are finding when you realize it doesn't seem to meet your needs. Most folks seem to get over this once the familiarity kicks in and they get the add-ons they need... well, added on. Additionally, GIMP can be used across platforms and this is really helpful to some folks. I don't know how it compares to Apple's artistic products as I've never used them.

I personally use Paint.net for light photo processing - mostly because I've used it for years. When I started, I needed a lightweight program to make simple things since I had a crappy computer. Of course, most of my needs are lightly editing photos of physical artwork and adding borders (because the borders look nice in the digital format). I keep GIMP installed on my computers, though, and my spouse uses GIMP for his digital work on his computers.

> Choices are then down to illegal copies

Didn't know that was even a choice... Seriously, if you're creating something, you wouldn't think about riping off someone else's creation.

If you don't like the pricing, there are plenty of alternatives, especially on Mac and Windows.

I think you are confusing ripping off someone's creation and stealing a tool used to create. Photoshop is no different from stealing paint, paper, paintbrushes, woodworking tools, pencils, pens, and so on. People might be able to tell what tool you used to create the work, but they won't be able to tell if the copy was legal, illegal, or if you used a borrowed computer - just like the physical tools.

Besides, not all the tools are good enough. Not everyone can buy tools. Hence the listing of the free tools, including the fairly common practice of having an illegal copy of photoshop (or other creative software). It is a commonly known issue to Adobe itself.

It's not my place to convince you to use GIMP. Either you do power stuff and Photoshop suits your needs better than GIMP, or you are not aware of GIMP's features (or you don't do power stuff).

However, I do want to point out that $120/year is not cheap.

For me, personally: I prefer not having to deal with WINE. GIMP is fairly powerful, even if it is a pain. It is the only alternative to Photoshop in the open source world. And 10 years ago, I would have said the only alternative, period. Many of the commercial alternatives were worse than GIMP.

You don't like Krita? I've been pretty happy with it, and it makes me want to scream at my screen less than the GIMP.

When I last looked at it (admittedly years ago), it was missing quite a lot of features that you can get as scripts/plugins for GIMP.

As an example, does Krita have the equivalent of Liquid Rescale? Or denoising?

(Actually, just looked up and Krita does now have an equivalent of Liquid Rescale)

As someone already pointed out, they are apps for different intents. Krita is not trying to work in the same space as GIMP/Photoshop.

Assuming the stuff in https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/66gl8h/what_can_gimp... is still true:

>There doesn't seem to be any way to work with individual color channels nor create custom channels (from selections or whatever) in Krita.

Ouch!

I]m not anti-Krita or anything. If it becomes good enough to do the tasks I usually do in GIMP (which frankly is not much!), then I'll happily switch.

I find that Krita is better for design work while GIMP tends to be better suited for editing.

Not trying to troll but what is the merit of an "open source desktop"?

Is it because said configuration typically consists of free of charge apps that it can be shared across anyone with a computer or is it about source transparency that makes you feel confident about what you are running?

Over the years, such importance lost priority for me when other closed source / paid (even under $50) alternatives are starting to mature and I can spare some money for apps if it increases my productivity.

In my case, source transparency and fitness of open source applications to the needs of my job.

I remember that when I could switch from Windows to Ubuntu in 2009 because I ended up using exactly the same apps there (except Putty, obviously, which I swapped with Gnome Terminal). I already had an open source desktop with the exception of the OS.

I'm using GIMP because Photoshop would be an overkill for what I do. Libreoffice is more than enough. Sometimes I do something very basic with Inkscape. All my work is basically browsers (open sourced), an editor (emacs), scripting languages (all open sourced). However I must admit that I have a closed source binary blob NVIDIA driver linked to my kernel.

> except Putty, obviously,

Putty not only exists for Linux, but is sometimes useful :) In particular, I've used it for serial connections.

There is one more aspect. Open source tools can not be taken away from you.

This is the primary reason I use open source as well. Software will remain available and its availability is not subject to third parties' whims.

It’s not either or.

The point is freedom and privacy, not saving 50 bucks here and there. Which is not available to everyone anyway, think high school kids and developing countries.

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