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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

I’ve come to the belief that the existence of GIMP is doing more harm than good.

The software itself just isn’t anywhere near the feature parity it needs to be. The UI and workflows are just not there for what users are expecting. I can’t suggest someone learn it because it just isn’t going to serve them well in the end.

But because it exists it means someone who would do it better has less incentive to do so.

Not that I consider Photoshop a good image editor anymore, over the past 8 years it’s degraded horribly. So now we just don’t have good image editors.

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First: doing harm to who? Gimp's an open source software that's been a boon to the community for a long time. I don't even use it, but I welcome its existence - it's not a virus, nor is it a bad influence upon the world since most people not inclined to use Gimp can stick to alternatives.

> But because it exists it means someone who would do it better has less incentive to do so.

That makes no sense. There are a ton of great image editors always striving to do better in the same domain - Affinity, Paint.NET, Photoscape, Canva, etc.

If GIMP did not exist, maybe we’d see more developers contributing to Krita?

Affinity - Paid, Closed source, no Linux version Paint.NET - Closed source, Windows only Photoscape - Closed source, no Linux version Canva - Closed source, subscription webapp

None of these fill the niche GIMP has claimed and I just feel in whatever alternate reality where the creators of GIMP never made it that someone else would have made an app that would manage to ship adjustment layers within a decade.

> I’ve come to the belief that the existence of GIMP is doing more harm than good.

This just seems like such a poor take. Can you imagine being a gimp dev and reading this?

My counter to this is that I've been using GIMP for what seems like two decades, it's what I'm familiar with and I'm much faster using that than other programs. I preferred Corel Draw when I used that, but hated Photoshop (for some reason it was all wrong, perhaps because I started on GIMP; but it was pretty much GIMP or nothing at the time [due to cost]). Krita has a lot going for it, and starting now I'd probably use that (with Inkscape for my needs); but I'm still more comfortable with GIMP and thankful for it.

GIMP is my goto image editor for over a decade. Tried other things and didn't see the appeal.

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