That’s all well and good, but if GIMP is targeting devs first who are also artists, Linux remains an OS without an image editor targeted at artists first. IMO that’s an important hole in the software library that prevents wider adoption.
No, it's not :)
"At the 31st of May, 1999, the KImageShop project officially kicked off with a mail by Matthias Elter."
From the very website you linked to :)
Still, a truly amazing project.
Krita is targeted at artists and illustrators, just like any other specialized tool. People don't look at Vim and complain that lacks desktop publishing features, despite novelists and programmers both needing to manipulate text.
The original complaint regarded tools for artists, and that's Krita. For photographers, there's DarkTable (https://www.darktable.org/), RawTherapee (http://www.rawtherapee.com/), and many others. For my modest needs, I find DigiKam (and occasionally The GIMP) adequate, though I am envious of proprietary tools.
And thus the cyclical debate continues for another turn while a competitive raster editor remains unavailable in the open source ecosystem.
But not, and I repeat -- not when complaints are made in demanding and offensive tone, without providing useful feedback.
Further, people have tried to get usability fixes into GIMP, and been shot down, as "that's not what the project wants to do."
What is the "dodging" in limiting functional scope of a tool? Each and every software project I know of places some limits on what it will and won't implement. Even Adobe has a suite of tools where one tool like Photoshop can do things Illustrator can't and vice versa. It's not Adobe being "dodgy" about their tools, and nor are open source projects.
Nothing stops people from forking GIMP, implementing whatever fixes they want, distributing, and even selling it. Refusing pull requests is not a crime.
To put that up as the solution is to be fully divorced from reality.
Just gimme the facts, please.
The confrontation comes from the fact that one side insists the software is there (GIMP), whereas the other side view them as disconnected from reality since its use in industry rounds to 0%.
And I think the attitude comes in when GIMP is ignorantly held up as if it were a serious competitor. It isn't. It's something else entirely. It might be good enough for people to make memes for internet shitposting, but between the missing features and the alien UI (to the point where a massive reskin [1] was around for a while), it's never going to be used in industry.
If the GIMP devs want to continue down this path, more power to 'em, I just want the people claiming that it's a Photoshop competitor to educate themselves :)
Who here is claiming GIMP is a serious competitor to Photoshop, or even a competitor at all? Even the GIMP team doesn't (https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#are-you-trying-to-dev...).
Or that GIMP is targeting graphics professionals or graphics industry? Don't think so... "We do, however, acknowledge the fact that people will treat GIMP as Photoshop replacement no matter what we tell them, and that’s all right with us. You own this software, it’s up to you to decide how you make use of it."
It is what it is. A tool. That happens to be free and is good enough for some. As somebody above said, it's like complaining why emacs / kate / geany or whatever editor can't do something that visual studio can. If the industry wants a serious competitor to Photoshop, time for them to start building it anew or taking existing free tools nearer to that goal or funding open source devs to do it for them. Complaining and ranting against open source devs who have zero obligations to the industry is not going to achieve anything.
If you're moving from one platform to another, you want legacy files to import perfectly, especially when you don't have time to convert old Illustrator assets into svg files.
On Mac/Windows at least, Affinity Designer was the first app around $50 or under that didn't mangle any of the .ai files I threw at it.
I think Pinta is a really good software for artists.
And unless you're an artist who does that yourself, it's a bit much to ask others to meet your needs for free like that in the first place.
If non-dev artists want to see that gap close, they need to contribute, not just wait for mana from heaven.
No, that doesn't have to mean actually writing the software. But it could mean paying someone else to do the coding, even if the software is ultimately released as OSS.