GIMP's 2022 Annual Report | Hacker News Reader

GIMP's 2022 Annual Report

gimp.org

78 pointscratermoon85 comments

I know many people have strong feelings about GIMP, and I just have to say that I love it. I use it for basic photo editing stuff—I’m not an artist—and it has always done what I needed it to do.

I gave up on comparing it to Photoshop over a decade ago, and by simply accepting it as its own thing (learning how it works and not grumbling about how this/that isn’t how Photoshop does it), it’s really not that difficult to learn. Just like vi (or photoshop) it’s a powerful tool and you need to spend some time to gain competence with it.

Gimp is in a tough spot, and it's easy to understand - it's an open source project that has bounced around for decades without strong leadership or corporate investment to pull it forward (cf. Blender).

In that time they haven't built non-destructive layers, they haven't improved the UI, and they've kept that stupid kink/ableist name.

Image editors in the near future will be 100% AI-first. Gimp is not going to make it.

GIMP can be used for what it is, as op is getting at. There's no need to "make it" to anything.

(BTW I used to teach Photoshop at the college level...AI editors and illustrators are Clip Art 2.0, and already have the same smell to them)

> Image editors in the near future will be 100% AI-first. Gimp is not going to make it.

30 years ago AI was also a big hype. As you can see, after 30 years AI is again the big hype. I presume that in 30 years (if we live that long) we will see again such statements that AI will solve everything.

Yes, as stated here: https://linkedrecords.com/which-jobs-are-being-replaced-by-a...

3D TVs will be making a comeback first! Or maybe VR?

I don't get why HN feels this way about AI. We're clearly onto something. Scratching the surface. The present day research hasn't even been productized - there's so much the current level of AI can and will improve. And yet research marches forward at blinding pace.

Because the same cycle is happening.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/how-chatgpt-could-take-micr...

We are going to end up with Clippy 2.0. Microsoft is going to want it to always nudge towards Microsoft services.

> Hey, it looks like you are trying to build a webservice. Would you like to switch to C# or Typescript?

I have seen this story 100 times before. We have barely scraped VR, but Facebook is bought up the leader and now we have a terrible experience with attempts to lock in all the time. We had barely scraped 3D, but Hollywood decided that it would be best if it were presented as Minions with yo-yos rather than subtle ways of increasing immersion.

We could have had really awesome phones that brought about social changes. Or we could have Apple trying to lock everyone into a chat silo and Google trying to produce an iPhone and Microsoft destroying the only innovative phone manufacturer.

I'm cynical because the folks investing in these things don't have our interests, they want to make a quick buck so they can fuck off to Mars.

I think it's disappointment fatigue.

Pareto's principle is alive and well, the first 20% of developing a technology is the easiest and most productive, but the actual goal is deep in the weeds of the non-trivial 80% of the work that must be done.

Thanks to capitalism, the work will stall alongside the profits. We'll get 30-50% of the way there, and hit the wall, that being that if we want general purpose AI we will have to pay researchers and developers more and more money for more and more diminishing returns.

Eventually we will hit the point where even though we are 80% of the way there, the bean counters won't justify the expense. "It's good enough, just stop here" they'll say, and then all of the research will be shelved for 5-7 years, then open sourced, and then muddled with for 10 years or so and then the cycle will repeat itself all over again until the right genius with the right background in the right time and right location finally codes the right bit of code or uncovers a new branch that we've overlooked and this all blows up again.

This is a decades-old comment, but many would like for its name to be changed.

I didn’t even know that Gimp had a slang definition until this thread.

Do you genuinely think this change would help the project? I don’t see how it does anything other than confuse potential users and cause a lot of discussion about something that doesn’t actually improve the functionality itself.

I’m certain renaming GIMP would make a tremendous difference. The name is perceived as offensive & that makes it impossible for people to take seriously, especially in a corporate setting. Edit: As someone who has tried to get people using it because it’s such great software.

I used it in my high-school multimedia class instead of Photoshop and my (female) teacher never bat an eyelid. I can't imagine many workplaces that would be more prudish than a Catholic school? The biggest obstacle I find is that people are used to Photoshop, and some tools are quite tricky to use (the alignment tool).

Someone could easily fork it and change nothing but the branding if the name was such a problem.

I'm pretty sure that the biggest threat to the adoption of GIMP isn't the name GIMP, it's Adobe doing regular Adobe things.

https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse

Maybe in America. I can assure elsewhere nobody has any idea of the offensive meaning.

We know what a gimp is, the film Pulp Fiction and the internet exist here :-)

They should rename it for americans. For the rest of the world it can stay the same.

Yep, same experience here. The name is a big problem.

I’m also unlikely to recommend it to kids, for example, because googling its name can be risky.

ROTFL. Never heard about this in 20 years. Doing an extended search shows that "gimp" is a kind of latex costume. There are worse things for kids than a latex costume. For example violence.

gimp is not a latex costume

google: define gimp

> / (ɡɪmp) / noun. US and Canadian offensive, slang a physically disabled person, esp one who is lame. slang a sexual fetishist who likes to be dominated and who dresses in a leather or rubber body suit with mask, zips, and chains.

(probably from urban dictionary)