Comment by 0xmarcin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xmarcin | Hacker News Reader

Sad, that it is not running on macOS. For the last few years I used Gimp, but I have a feeling that Gimp is getting more and more unintuitive nowadays (if it ever was intuitive).

Recently I needed to do some ad-hoc drawings and I found myself using one of these online paint clones. They are not as comfy as desktop apps but they are doing the job good enough.

I would really like to see Paint.NET running on macOS. I think MS efforts for making .NET cross platforms are somehow half-assed. They ported just so much to run web apps and REST services, but totally gave up on GUI stuff. Maybe it's their strategy to lock up devs to windows machines, as there are many tools like ILSpy that .NET devs often use.

The community answer, the last time I checked, was AvaloniaUI (https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia) which is cross platform port of WPF (at least XAML based). ILSpy is already ported to it (https://github.com/icsharpcode/AvaloniaILSpy) but it runs poorly on Linux & mac (I have experienced random crashes and other UI problems). I hope the project will do well and within a year or two we will also see a port of Paint.NET to it.

If you want something with gimp-level features in a slightly neater package you might try krita instead. It has a more familiar look you might expect from a digital drawing program. Most major issues I've had with gimp have been fixed in the last few years but it's still not a very elegant UI and some things remain counter-intuitive.

> but I have a feeling that Gimp is getting more and more unintuitive nowadays (if it ever was intuitive).

I want to love Gimp, its interface and window layout is aesthetically pleasing to me for a pro-level graphics program.

But as a non-pro, I have to google how to do even simple stuff b/c it's not discoverable or obvious from the interface. Just the other day I had to google how to draw a circle around something in a digital photo, which is about the simplest operation you could want to do. You can't just circle something with the lasso/elliptical select tool, there's more to it.

I can't fault Gimp too hard, though, it's aiming for pro's and power users, which I'm not. Frequent Gimp users will quickly learn Gimp's ways of doing simple things, and then move on to the harder stuff.

I caved in and bought Pixelmator for Mac OS. It's actually nice to have an editor native to Mac OS that isn't cobbled together ancient UI and code a la Adobe Photoshop.

Pixelmator is great, the closest thing to paint.net, an d it closes almost every possible demand of a casual user.

Thank you for the tip on Pixelmator, I took a look and like it so far. Buying good software is not “caving in”.

> Gimp is getting more and more unintuitive nowadays

Make GIMP look like Photoshop - https://github.com/doctormo/GimpPs

Another more extensive guide on how to make GIMP look and behave like Photoshop - https://www.pcsteps.com/1566-make-gimp-look-work-like-photos...

It’s not something you can paper over with the theme. Basic things like copy/paste are broken depending on how you use them, changing brush size is surprisingly clunky, etc. The GIMP UI has been awful for at least 20 years. I have a long list of complaints about the GIMP, but at least it does some of the basics and it doesn’t crash very often.

> but totally gave up on GUI stuff.

A cross-platform desktop/mobile GUI is coming on .NET 6 with .NET MAUI.

MAUI won't make .NET 6 launch and has been delayed.

gimp's time is over. No one liked it as their first choice for the past 20 years with more competitions, it's not going to get any more market share.

Mac has Pixelmator and Windows and Mac have Affinity Photo as Photoshop alternative for some.

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