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Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

Between Gimp, Inkscape and Krita, what are the things not covered in this domain?

It’s worth mentioning Blender 2.8 too. This is software people are leaving top tier commercial 3D apps like Maya for because it is better. The stereotype of unfriendly UI and UX in open software is breaking down and does not have to be a given.

Blender is good for character animation, but it's learning curve is higher and there aren't as many QoL improvements as in other 3d software. 2.8 is a step in the right direction but I still find cinema4d to be much much much faster to get results with for my purposes of motion graphics.

Speed really is the crux of the biscuit. It's not like you can't get the same results using FOSS, but the amount of time and effort to do so is significantly increased.

For some simple photo manipulation Gimp works - but it seems a lot harder to use. Plus it's missing non-destructive adjustment layers, and the brush engine is nowhere near as advanced as photoshop.

Inkscape is similar - everything is a little harder to do - and there's some basic things that don't seem to be in the application at all. Does Inkscape support multiple artboards yet? What about exporting multiple resolutions without duplicating the assets? The symbol support also was very lackluster when I used it last.

Krita lags horribly every time I've tried to use it.

I like the notion that there are open source replacements for these systems.. and I'd love to drop my $50+ per month subscription - but the alternatives aren't yet equivalents.

You're not wrong, but we all know why it's not better: nobody's paying to make it better, so the only way to get it better is via adoption and a larger community actively trying to make it better.

Basically, yes, it hurts, but maybe try using it more? It's certainly better than nothing, which is what we may have if, I dunno, Adobe collapses or something crazy and all our Photoshop licenses suddenly stop working.

You can use such stuff more if you don't want to be productive, and this is coming from a 100% Linux user for nearly half of my life. Unless you write code then the contributions are basically useless.

> but it seems a lot harder to use

I actually feel the exact opposite - it's easier to use than Photoshop - but that's probably because I used GIMP before I ever had access to Photoshop.

100% agree about Inkscape, though.

GIMP: My understanding is that at some point the UI design brahmins at GNOME decided that GTK+ must not support MDI (as in the UI paradigm where you have a container window with subwindows floating around inside it), and moreover the same kind of user interface should be implemented at the top level because a good window manager should be able of keeping an application's windows together. Well, no such window manager ever emerged, and as a result using GIMP is a perpetual search for what workspace a particular tool window disappeared to, or having to fight with it deciding that the minimum size of particular windows (tall toolbars, large viewports) is greater than the 1366x768 of my laptop screen. This is frustrating to the point of unusability.

Krita: Constant random crashes, like seemingly every complex Qt application.

Inkscape: I grew up on CorelDraw so maybe I just have the wrong set of expectations, but the UX is full of papercuts and inexplicable choices. For just one example that annoyed me recently, it seemed completely impossible to get snapping to grids and guidelines to behave; some objects would just refuse to snap to certain targets (different set for each object), and generally the snapping seemed to be based on arbitrary "basepoints" (only one per object; can you change those?) rather than bounding boxes.

(Blender, brought up elsewhere: actually quite good (modulo maybe the confusing refcounting/resource management), once you get on top of the learning curve. I hope 2.8, which I haven't tried yet, hasn't changed this.)

> GNOME decided that GTK+ must not support MDI (as in the UI paradigm where you have a container window with subwindows floating around inside it), and moreover the same kind of user interface should be implemented at the top level because a good window manager should be able of keeping an application's windows together.

This is what macOS does, and does it well. Aqua/Quartz (is it still called that?) doesn't support (or at least doesn't encourage) MDI either, but unlike Windows it's app-centric instead of document-centric, which can annoy some Windows users when ALL of an app's windows come to front when they click on its icon in the dock.

Does gimp feature non-destructive multiple filtering on layers yet ? Photoshop CS2 (and you know why I mention that specific version) from more than ten years ago has it.

Using those tools for professional graphics work is like being a software developer and using notepad as your text editor, or being a chef and using a residential electric stove in your restaurant. Sure, it's possible to achieve similar (or in some cases equivalent) results, but it's just not worth the hassle.

Also, when you're making artwork on a deadline, fooling with virtual machines and things like that just doesn't make sense. There are just too many moving parts. Having to deal with layers of technology is a serious impediment to letting your creativity flow.

I first installed Linux off of floppies in the mid-90s on a hand-me-down 486— my distaste for that workflow isn't born from lack of experience or technical knowlege— it's born from the knowledge of the very real consequences of having an overly complicated toolchain when doing time-sensitive work.

Gimp/inkscape are not drop in replacements for ps/illustrator. Unless your use case is very basic.

Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects? Many people do really need them!

I've gotten way too addicted to DxO. But it runs fine in a VM.

That said, I only use it a couple times a month. If I had to run it professionally, I'm not sure I'd be down.

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