I also remember downloading blender during my university years back in early 2004. Man was it crap compared to Maya or 3dMax. But nowadays it is incredible.
Gimp is an amazing tool and its creators deserve our gratitude. Then there is Krita, which is another amazing tool and its creators deserve our gratitude. Then there is LibreOffice, ditto. Then there is KiCAD, ditto. Then there is ...
I am not saying this to detract from Ton's contributions. I am saying this because a lot of people have made contributions to the open source world and, by extension, to the lives of many people. We shouldn't be treating this as a competition.
Competitively, libre office has a fairly similar UI to the pre-ribbon office suite, which people at the time much preferred once the ribbon came around (before they got used to it anyway) but it hasn't had the same disruption that blender did. I suspect the file format compatibility issues and die-hard Excel fans have a lot to do with it, but it's an interesting counterpoint to the assertion that the UI is responsible for the difference in adoption rates.
When the Ribbon UI came around in office, it faced a ton of push back due to moving so many things around and hiding so many common operations, but the file format translation issues between office and alternatives kept people in the MS cage, I think.
Nowadays many users grew up with the ribbon, so it doesn't seem so painful.
I grew up pre-ribbon. I did not like the ribbon. MS Office 97 still had a way better UI than anything open/libre office did.
If i had to rank, i would say
Old pre-ribbon ms office > ms office with ribbon > [a large gap] open/libre office.
The Blender team did not always accept code or suggestions. This has been a running theme with several people I've known that felt their work and/or ideas were rejected by people that didn't grasp their brilliance. There was a possibly unusual willingness to say no, but it was more discerning than with GIMP which gave off the appearance of vetoing virtually everything. (At one time all GIMP woes would be solved by CinePaint aka "Film Gimp").
But it was combined with the idea of the studio, in order to find out where exactly the pain points are to be addressed. In a sense this is agile software done right, where you get the users and devs alongside each other with a common goal. Unsurprisingly one result is the UI today is not mocked in the way it was 20 years ago, while the GIMP UI has remained a constant point of confusion.
I'm not sure Blender development is "agile" in the traditional sense of the term because from the outside there are signs that it is slow paced with high inertia (specialists in charge of large features, planning over many months, purpose-specific contractors and GSoC projects, features that are delayed until they are ready), but they are certainly successful at delivering copious, high quality and high value features. Let's hope that the good leadership continues.
If only...
Krita is awesome too and does interfaces right as well. Bought it on Steam. But I still use Gimp since the use cases are different. But it might perhaps be worthwhile to put your open source project on Steam anyway to make some bucks. I would happily buy more.
Blender did make huge jumps in recent years. Suddly you couldn't even update as fast as they introduced new things. It is amazing by now but I would argue that its functionality was unfairly derided in the past while it was already quite capable for quite some time.
Gimp for a looooong time was a multi-window user interface, completely antithetical to almost any other application released in the last 20 years or so.
Same as Mac software in the late 90s. GIMP is/allows MDI, tabs or whatever it is called. A decade old at least, Wikipedia is not clear if the change was "new feature" or "new default but avaliable before". Maybe Mac native software went that way too, no idea what is the trend there now. Most things reinvent everything including window management, poorly, inside a browser, anyway.
Still kinda stupid easy to accidentally have non-destructive edit filters making your entire computer fall over because you have these filters that are slow to apply... but the UI works out quite well now
A few years later, someone said I should try it again. It's finally good. And they were right. My whole team uses Blender now and we're very satisfied with it.
I've heard the same thing with GIMP: "Try it again. It's good now." Unfortunately, this isn't true and likely will never be.
I use GIMP almost exclusively in my job. I have photoshop, but I know GIMP and I'm better with it. I make presentation pieces and fix images, do image data rescue and make fun pieces with it on the side, like posters for my bands and accidental art made by playing with sliders in the FX.
Its very versatile and capable, but it is almost entirely unlike photoshop, and since I grew up with it I vastly prefer GIMP over photoshop.
I disagree. I use Affinity Photo 2, which also has a different interface, and it's so much easier to use than GIMP despite having more features.
A big problem for a chunk of possible users was that GIMP's colour support sucked (and I believe it's still not really fixed). The moment you wanted to work outside RGBA at 8bits per channel, and maybe a bit playing with indexed color, you were in for a lesson in pain. And a lot of people wanted a tool they could earn money with, and that meant for a long time at least some amount of print work. And print, even digital printing, means CMYK. Later on photography started demanding HDR features. Even web these days will deal with non-RGB color spaces, and I am not talking about HDR.
Meanwhile GIMP's engine for years even if in UI you technically could select colours in CMYK, they were internally converted to RGB for calculations, then converted again. CinePaint, aka FilmGimp, started because people could not get patches for 48bit RGBA into mainline. And so on, and so on. Meanwhile Photoshop and other competitors would not only have a less divisive UI, but also additional features (I knew people who would choose Photoshop just for included pantone colour database).
I'm not punching at all.
Like, you can claim the weird name is a celebration of how anti-corporate and unfettered the team is, but whenever I try tell people about it for the first time, it’s super distracting and adds a lot of unnecessary friction. It always goes like this:
“Photoshop licenses are so expensive, I wish there was something cheaper since many of our team members don’t need all the features.”
“Have you tried GIMP? Now hold on, I know the—“
“I’m sorry, tried what?!”
“It’s got a weird name, but a lot of people find it a really good replacement for—“
“Wait, is it named after that BDSM guy from Pulp Fiction?”
“Well it’s an acronym… (sigh) but also, yes. But it’s really solid software people have been—“
“Why on Earth would you name a product after that guy?”
I think tools like git get past this issue by being so aggressively useful and now ubiquitous, but in the early stages of a project if you don’t have the massive adoption git had (which led to a positive feedback loop of more feature development leading to more users) then you can end up dragging your name like an albatross around your neck.
In general I think naming is a vastly overblown issue. If bike shedders had their way, we would never have names as nondescript as Apple or Amazon, or as obscure as Google, yet they are wildly, unreasonably successful.
Gimp’s adoption problem lies elsewhere.
Nowadays in America, if someone over the age of 30 (and many people under the age of 30) hear the word “gimp” or more specifically “the gimp”, their mind immediately flashes back to this scene from the incredibly popular movie Pulp Fiction (this clip is not safe for work and depicts sexual assault) https://youtu.be/PcZUjEWFpKs
If you check the first paragraph of the History section of GIMP’s Wikipedia page, you can see that this is not a coincidence, the creators did in fact name it after the character from that clip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP
So no, I don’t think this is an issue of “any interesting name being too controversial”. There are many places you could draw the line before getting to “let’s name our software after the Gimp from Pulp Fiction”.