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Comment by maddyboo | Hacker News Reader

Before I got into programming as a teenager, GIMP was one of the first "advanced" pieces of software I really dove into. I learned so much just messing around, creating wallpapers, editing screenshots from games, making photo-manipulation "art", logos for imaginary companies (and later even a few real ones). I am so grateful such a wonderful, free, open source piece of software existed for me to play with, I think it's part of what sparked my interest in computing.

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Automating some tedious tasks to generate 1000's of image sets with python-fu was one of the things that made me love programming. Also was my introduction to lisp when i tried first with script-fu, but that was mostly incomprehensible to me since im dum.

In a similar vein, the thing that got me to try Linux when my previous computing/programming experience was VBScript in high school and Matlab in my ChemE degree, was a bash one liner that renamed and organized by date some photographs that a group of many friends had taken from a vacation trip. I thought it was incredible that that kind of power was available a terminal away, and also a first class feature.

Gimp has fallen far behind of what is an advanced software. The GUI is atrocious and it's still using GTK2 which is blurry on my scaled screen. And as it seems there is no way out anytime soon.

It was advanded - 10 years ago.

The GUI is perfectly fine. I use it all the time and it does everything I need. Sometimes I have to look up how to do something but that's true of any program. What exactly is it missing?

I think his point was more about the GUI technology, instead of the GUI layout. The GUI does not behave very well on HiDPI screens with scaling.

I do not really understand the problem here. Why do you need to scale instead of using a larger font?

"Why do you need to X?"

This is what I sounded like when I was trying to convince my non-nerd friends that they should use Linux on their laptops. People have different requirements. If a modern interface that isn't blurry on modern screens is one of those requirements, then so be it. Convincing them that their requirement is wrong isn't going to fix GIMP

GTK2 doesn't "scale" at all, so whatever is making it blurry on your computer isn't that. Probably you've got a desktop that's trying too hard to scale things. I hate blurriness so I turn all "scaling" off and just set my screen DPI to its real physical value (Xorg, criminally, lies to apps and says it's 96 by default - I force it in .xinitrc with xrandr). DPI-aware apps Just Work, and if it uses raw pixels, it just looks small. I believe for GTK2 you can load a pre-scaled theme, which will solve the too-small thing.

Scaling is evil. DPI is the one true king.

Agree, the only difficulty to work with DPI is when you have several physical screens. X, from what I understood, combines them to one single virtual screen, with a single DPI setting :-/

> The GUI is atrocious and it's still using GTK2 which is blurry on my scaled screen.

I'm running GIMP 2.10.x on a HiDPI display (2560x1440, laptop). Nothing is blurry.

What version do you have? Sounds like 2.8.something.

> And as it seems there is no way out anytime soon.

The last section of the release notes kind of covers that.

I had basically this exact experience with GIMP, truly life-changing software for me.

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