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TL;DR: A program needs either (a) features + good UX/I or (b) rock-solid stability + amazing performance characteristics to compensate for anything else lacking. Gimp has neither, it's some kind of "middle ground" thingy that annoys everyone.

> give up your freedom for a few extra features

Not really, I use like 10% max of Photoshop's features I guess. But those features simply feel perfectly implemented, they just f work. Heck, I even use it for vector graphics sometimes because it "just works" and feels more natural than Illustrator.

And I'm not just used to PS. I actually liked Corel Photoshop more back in the day.

And Inkscape has the same natural/intuitive feel to it after you use it a bit. Starts to crack once the complexity grows, but for starter it just works. Blender has a learning curve, but afterwards it also feels "natural" and "well built".

Gimp is just bad at... everything: (1) performance feels horrible, like doing everything in slow mo compared to anything else (2) UI feels very inconsistent and has very weird concepts about the relationship between layers and selections and stuff like that (like "wtf is a 'floating selection' thingy doing in my layers panel? ...you get used to it, but boy it's weird), keyboard shortcuts don't work in all contexts (sometimes it feels like they randomly stop working) and (3) there's no easy way to reversibly do things like ad an adjustment/effect layer, turn effect on and of on a layer or some groups from the layers panel etc.

I don't care about color space support or even mildly advanced features. And I could put up with a "weird" UI if I could find some logic or intuition for it. But at least stellar performance and stability would be requirements. If you can do things fast enough and things don't crash at 30 huge layers, even non-destructive edits cease to be a "must have" since you can just clone stuff like crazy and always have multiple "versions" of the "same" layer in the same doc. That's how lots of professional graphic designers use PS anyway. I was once handed a 20GB "trashcan psd" from a designer, and I hated every second of touching it, but it miraculously worked, relevant content was extractable, and the job got done.

Honestly, its hard to say what's wrong with Gimp, because I can't figure out anything fully right about it. Even the fact that I'm comparing with Adobe Photoshop, a program itself known for horribly beginner-hostile and unintuitive (but in a weird way "learnable" and "natural") UI is a sign of how off things are.

> Honestly, its hard to say what's wrong with Gimp, because I can't figure out anything fully right about it. Even the fact that I'm comparing with Adobe Photoshop, a program itself known for horribly beginner-hostile and unintuitive (but in a weird way "learnable" and "natural") UI is a sign of how off things are.

Ugh, this is so true. I've never done professional graphics work, but I've used Photoshop on and off for small projects since they added color in version 2.0. I WANT to like Gimp and I give it a shot every year or so, but it never clicks. I mentally prepare myself for a different experience and try to keep an open mind, all while considering that my comfort will change with use, and I always leave disappointed and frustrated.

I mean, how do they make simply selecting something difficult? Even layers were unintuitive last time I tried Gimp. I've used a lot of janky software, but Gimp is the most bewildering case. You immediately see really good ideas expressed in the UI and then you interact with it and the whole thing collapses.

I thought maybe I was remembering things wrong, so I fired Gimp up for the first time in months (v2.8.22 - I keep it updated with Chocolatey). It took 2 minutes to load (no image) from an NvME drive on a quad core system with a 1080Ti. That's 1.5 minutes longer than any other program I have installed. Probably not optimized at install-time, when the user has time to burn, and instead opts for optimization at first launch, when the user actually needs to use the software. Bad start.

Open image. Select part and adjust brightness. Click OK. Click and drag outside selection... and the brightness dialog pops up? But, wha... B/C is a tool. Weird but okay. Apply filter, click and drag, and B/C again? Undo, wait, no, have to cancel. Alright, let's move this selected area over... Why is the entire canvas being moved? Undo. Trying rotate... 3 icons from the move tool on the same line, but it only rotates the selection. Of course. Rotate selection and hit enter... nothing. Oh, the rotate dialog isn't in focus. No, wait. It is. Enter does nothing. Unfocused? Now Enter works.

Adding a layer. First click on new layer button not detected. Second works. Select background layer and marquee a small part. Ctrl+C. Select newly made layer. Ctrl+V. Probably can't see it because it's pasted on top of the exact same part of the image. Select move tool, click and drag, no, nothing was pasted. Click and drag again to be sure and the part I rotated earlier now moves across the screen. Hide background and 'floating selection' to confirm nothing pasted.

3.5 minutes and about 15 undos/cancel button clicks to do 'all' that. I repeated the above in Paint.NET, including launching, in 15 seconds and 2 undos from one minor quirk.

It's like a luxury car assembled inside out. In theory, you have a luxury car, but in practice you're sitting on cold metal with an engine block obstructing your view of the road. Sure, a bunch of mechanics could take pieces off and attach them properly, but you've been driving the car around town for 22 years and this is the best they've managed so far.

I use gimp semi frequently. It's never taken more than 10-20 seconds to start up. 2 minutes sounds like a huge outlier... I'm running on a x230 (over 5 year old laptop with an i5) w/ Fedora.

Just ran it again. This time it took 23 seconds. All these on Win 10 x64 1709 using the highly accurate "1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi..." technique.

PC: 6700k OC @4.5GHz, 32GB/1TB NvME (4x PCIE mode), 1080Ti, most background processes off: GIMP 1st run: 90 s. GIMP 2nd run: 23 s. Paint.Net 1st run: 3 s. Paint.Net 2nd run: 2 s. Paint3D 1st run: 2 s. Paint3D 2nd run: 2 s. Krita 1st run: 7 s. (v3.3.3 first run ever) Krita 2nd run: 4 s. Gravit Designer: 6 s. (first run ever) Visual Studio 2017 takes 18 seconds with a handful of extensions.

Ugh, VS2017 update out...

Outdated version of Photoshop WHILE updating Visual Studio, 1st launch: 17 s. Krita WHILE crypto-mining on 3/4 logical processors (pinned to 100% usage): 4 s. Paint.NET while opening 30 tabs in Chrome: 4 s. GIMP while opening different 30 tabs in Chrome: 25 s. (reduce the chance of cache loads, not scientific, Chrome finished loading first, by about 10 seconds)

On a Surface Pro 3 (Core i7)... Krita while installing Windows updates, 1st run ever: 17 s. Krita 2nd run, updates still installing: 10 s GIMP, no updates installing, clean GIMP install, 1st run: 243 second. Yes, 243. GIMP 2nd run: 17 s.

Tried GIMP again on my desktop, no unusual background processes. 3rd launch: 18 s. 4th launch with mining pinning 3/4 CPU: 23 s.

So, overall, one of the most often recommended FOSS alternatives, even by ME, is a distant last place in these extremely ad hoc, unscientific, off the cuff tests across 2 machines. It also made me hate Mississippi. I was really hoping GIMP would have some trick up its sleeve to surprise me, but it did not. And this is not far from my past experience on Windows.

Maybe (hopefully) it's better on Linux... one sec...

Mint in VirtualBox: GIMP 1st run: 5 s GIMP 2nd run:2 s.

Hahaha. That just tickles me. It appears GIMP is the iTunes of graphics programs on Windows. Down the rabbit hole...

Within Windows Subsystem for Linux (Ubuntu with vcxsrv as X Windows server) GIMP 1st run (with some bash errors related to OpenGL): 43 s. GIMP 2nd run (still some errors): 5 s.

It's like they anti-optimized the thing for Windows.

Take away: I'll never recommend GIMP to a Windows user again. Linux? Sure, if the UI doesn't bother you, enjoy! But, it's a miserable experience on Windows compared to every other option and should only be used if a particular function can only be performed in GIMP.

Just wanted to say kudos! That's awesome that you did all this. Should relay this to the gimp people some how.

So basically the main problem you have is that color tools (they are filters now) stay active after being applied?

It's more than that. Sometimes the tools act as if they are aware of the context - something is selected, something was previously used, something is often used following the current state - and other times it completely ignores all context.

Like the way it pops up dialog boxes for most of the geometry manipulation tools, pulling focus from the canvas where you have to hit Enter to commit changes. If I'm dragging with the mouse, I want to simply drag it into position quickly and be done, not search for an OK button or swap focus. It's fine to add some form of fine tuning, but that's usually done with either a menu command or a tool information bar within the GUI. It's functionally the same thing as asking "Are you sure?" at the end of every action.

It violates basic UI assumptions, so unless you use it constantly, you're going to forget which tools operate on which elements in which state. Other graphics programs follow logical flows that are intuitive - select layer, select area of picture, copy, select new layer, paste = selected area in new layer. GIMP wants to buffer every action with an intermediate state that allows some further manipulation, but then provides no intuitive way to take advantage of that state. Like the retention of selected areas as 'floating selections' (or whatever they're called) in the layers list.

Here's a rough analogy: You crack an egg on the edge of a bowl. GIMP wants you to hold onto the egg because you might want to smush it in your fingers or whisper a secret to it now. If you try to put it in the bowl, GIMP ignores that there's a 99% chance that the recipe doesn't call for eggshell bits, so your first attempt results in having to clean out the bowl and crack another egg. Then you realize you first you have to specify that the shell should be removed, with options to change the angle of the shell crack relative to the bowl and the height from which the egg innards are released. Completed, you choose to crack another egg, but because you had not changed focus from the bowl, you proceed to smash the bowl on the counter.

I'm sure there are legitimate cases where having access to those intermediates can be useful, but they shouldn't interrupt every logical step in a common process.

As xbkingx is writing, it would seem like Windows version of Gimp has some serious performance issues. I'm mainly running Gimp in Debian on a laptop with 512 MB RAM, and the performance is pretty OK (as long as I don't go above 150dpi on A3 prints).

Inkscape has also been crashing on me a lot in the past and was way too heavy, but since they released the 0.91 with the new Cairo-based renderer, it's been pretty fast and stable.

I've personally had a harder time with Blender. I've found it particularly confusing that about half of the functionality seems to just not work when using the game engine. And when importing a video for editing, the length of the video and the audio may not match up.

Inkscape is actually pretty good for basic vector manipulating and making SVG files, but yeah, it's pretty basic. The handles are much larger to click on than Illustrator though.

"I think it's a bit sad to be whinging at those good pieces of free software for lacking features, and just recommend proprietary software instead. Surely, it is also the developers of the proprietary software that are causing this lack of features by not sharing their code for those."

That is probably the most ludicrous statement I've heard today. Being "free software" does not shield you from criticism. And it is not Adobe's fault that the developers of that software do not have a feature. That's entirely on the developers of those programs.

And most people do not care one iota about whether a piece of software is "free" or not. They care if it makes their life easier, and allows them to get a task done. If free software isn't up to it, and a piece of proprietary software is, then the proprietary software is what gets the nod.

"It also suggests you are willing to give up your freedom for a few extra features."

No, it means I want to get my shit done. Just because you are willing to wait does not mean anyone else is.

> And most people do not care one iota about whether a piece of software is "free" or not.

Can "most people" afford paying $600 yearly fee to edit images? Are "most people" concerned if they fail to make a yearly payment and loose access to all their projects because of vendor lock-in with Adobe's products? Most people I speak to about this are very concerned about this, although they may not know that these problems are caused by Adobe apps being non-free. (But not knowing the cause of a problem doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist)

> Being "free software" does not shield you from criticism.

I agree totally. I just don't think that suggesting proprietary alternatives in this context is particularly helpful as they also lack features of freedom, e.g. sharing, privacy and absence of vendor lock-in.

> And it is not Adobe's fault that the developers of that software do not have a feature. That's entirely on the developers of those programs.

If Adobe freed the source code of Photoshop, how long do you think it would take for missing features to make it into Gimp?

> They care if it makes their life easier, and allows them to get a task done.

... except if the task involves working with other people who may not have access to that software, or may not want to run proprietary software, or may not want to give up their privacy or freedom.

> If Adobe freed the source code of Photoshop, how long do you think it would take for missing features to make it into Gimp?

If that were to happen, it stands to reason that Gimp would never get any new features, ever again.

"Can "most people" afford paying $600 yearly fee to edit images?"

Considering Adobe's Creative Cloud is pretty popular, it seems that yeah, they can. But that's irrelevant to whether a piece of software is FLOSS or not.

"although they may not know that these problems are caused by Adobe apps being non-free"

How dare those bastards ask to be paid for their work!

"I just don't think that suggesting proprietary alternatives in this context is particularly helpful as they also lack features of freedom, e.g. sharing, privacy and absence of vendor lock-in."

In this context, nobody gave a shit about that. They wanted the features that let them get their work done. If FLOSS doesn't have it, it doesn't get used. End of story.

"If Adobe freed the source code of Photoshop, how long do you think it would take for missing features to make it into Gimp?"

Irrelevant, cause that's not going to happen. If the Gimp developers aren't good enough to make those features themselves, without copying off of Adobe, perhaps they should work on something else.

"... except if the task involves working with other people who may not have access to that software, or may not want to run proprietary software, or may not want to give up their privacy or freedom."

So, nobody? Photoshop is the industry standard. If you're not using it, you're the one who's the odd person out, not them.

Harsh tone here on HN.

> How dare those bastards ask to be paid for their work!

Totally fine with people charging for their work. Fact is, however, that for half the population of the world, Adobe CS's pricing $50/month is at least 2/3 of their total earnings[1]. By that definition, it's just wrong to say that for "most people" it's an valid alternative to Krita or Gimp.

[1] https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-global-p...

Photoshop + Lightroom cost 12 euros. The CS price you mention is for all the apps in the creative cloud, not just the raster image editing bit, so that's unfair to compare $50/month to "alternative to krita or gimp". 12 euros per month is just 2 euros more than many of us here pay for lots of entertainment, such as music streaming services. It's well worth every penny spent just to not have to deal with the horror that's GIMP's UI. It's a lot cheaper to get access to Photoshop than it used to be before the monthly licensing scheme.

On top of that, the keys for all Adobe CS2 products have been openly released since they took their activation servers online. I would argue that most people don't need most or many of the new features added since CS2.