2. GIMP needs RAW support, precision support, and a better data backbone
3. GIMP needs a rename. It's both a sex kink term [1] (not to yuck anyone's yums) and a slur term for disabled people [2]
4. Gen AI will probably disrupt all of this anyway.
2. GIMP isn't a raw editor, use darktable or rawtherapee
3. Poor naming decisions do not warrant a change this late, people know GIMP
4. Keep dreaming
I say this as someone who has used GIMP for two decades now. It was the first real image editor I used, so the UI/UX is fine to me, but it's clearly a problem.
GIMP is steadfast about the name, but has been slowly incorporating UI/UX improvements since its existence. (Single window mode, canvas rotation, more consistent UI on Macs with 3.0, high DPI support, etc.) GIMP doesn't have raw support yet, but it does have high bitdepth support (both integer and floating point).
The whole point of GIMPShop and PhotoGIMP are to address these pain points.
Perception matters; Y'all are so wild for this.
It's not like it was an accident, either. GIMP is a backronym because they wanted to name it after the full-body sex slave suit. They shot themselves in the face with that one.
For example there’s a juice company here in the US named ’Suja,’ and it’s obvious they have no Brazilian employees because it means dirty/obscene in Portuguese.
Simple words sometimes mean unfortunate things in other countries. Adults get over them.
I personally can download this software and use it on my computer.
Now, can I recommend it to my class? Through zero fault or opinion of my own, it still might be a very bad idea for me professionally.
Maybe I don't like how sensitive people are. TOO BAD, it doesn't matter in this context.
The clowns who refuse to rename GIMP keep missing a huge opportunity.
This is not surprising, the developers were English-speaking Americans who chose a name to cause offense on purpose, in reference to the full-body sex slave suit in Pulp Fiction: https://www.xach.com/gg/1997/1/profile/1/
I don't know who you claim to represent with "the rest of us", but I can only speak for the experience in America. It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with me, it's a simple fact that the name GIMP has been a barrier to its adoption.
Yes, finally looked it up after listening to boring complaints for two decades. Don’t care; mildly amusing collision.
It's also worth emphasizing that "Pulp Fiction" is not an obscure movie, it was actually a very very popular movie from the 1990s and it's still relevant today. It won awards from every organization that gave movies awards. It was recently quoted by the US Secretary of Defense during a prayer, who thought he was quoting the Bible.
While I believe you when you say you're personally not familiar with the usage of the word, it's a word that you can expect most people would recognize.
Reminds me of those creeps in "Footloose" trying to outlaw dancing. Puritanism can get fucked. ;-)
I'm anti-Puritan as well, but there are far better hills to die on. In either case, it's moot, since "gimp" is also used as an ableist slur.
I haven't seen Footloose, but we don't need analogies to fictional movie villains. The facts are that they decided to give GIMP a stupid name, and so they missed out on investment and adoption because of that decision. It doesn't matter what you or I think, I'm just describing something that already happened.
It does not matter what you think. It does not matter what I think. No amount of condescending comments online can go back and change it, the name "GIMP" has caused problems for people, including me, when trying to use it in professional and K-12 contexts.
The ways I personally learned people took offense at these words were when I was trying to use GIMP in highschool, asking if I could "use the GIMP" for a project. My instructor, a man who was paralyzed from the waist down, understandably thought I was punking him. I wouldn't learn this until later, but the most reasonable interpretation was that I was being a shithead, as many teenagers are.
When I explained "GIMP was like Photoshop but free", while Photoshop was already installed on the computers, you won't be surprised the conversation ended there and Photoshop won out.
It's not just that the name was insulting. In most peoples minds, nothing good is free, and "Free photoshop clone" was right up there with "Here's a prize for the 1,000,000th visitor" or "Download these free mouse cursors".
Offense aside, you can still understand that this is a bad idea without bringing in the spectre of "is it offensive."
Like I'm saying elsewhere, what if it was called "Poop-edit" or similar? People would quite reasonably not believe it to be quality software, even if it was.
And also, no one would USE IT. That's my point. It really is that simple.
I'm not primarily talking about "being offended." Jokes are fine in some contexts.
I'm saying that if you want people to take your software seriously, it needs a serious name. And that the GIMP people very very stupidly missed a huge opportunity by not doing that.
And in the dictionary I found at least one quite positive definition. Sometimes word have conflicting meanings and we deal with that successfully every day.
Your individual anecdote isn't data.
Not looking to assess how well-known Pulp Fiction is in any particular generation, but Chainsaw Man opening seems to have plenty of obscure references that really say more about its authors than they do about its watchers.
Here is the full quote:
> > Your home page says that you created GIMP to address the lack of free or inexpensive Unix graphics tools. How did you guys actually get together to tackle this? Was it like in Blues Brothers? Were you on a mission from God?
> Spencer was my brother's roommate for four years. (He's been my roommate for the past six months). So I knew who he was when we decided to take the compilers course here together. Big mistake. During one of the impossibly boring assignments we decided we wanted to do something which wouldn't suck. The idea of doing the GIMP actually fell out fairly naturally.
> It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for.
Also these tend to work when the new project has momentum and enough developers.
Sodipodi was forked to Inkscape, part of it was they wanted to change language to C++.
The momentum went to the new program.
Over the many times this topic was brought up here, plenty of people from English-speaking countries have said that no, they’ve never had a problem with it.
Yes, some people did have a problem with it. It's a valid point to bring up. But that does not mean their experience must have been shared by literally everyone else, or even the majority of people in similar circumstances.
What is the strong motivation behind keeping the name and was it valid?
(No. The answer is no, it was not. There's no real good reason to keep it compared to the potential upsides.)
I think if GIMP had a different name, it would have had less friction in its adoption (or a higher "R-number"), Adobe would be less extractive (for having viable FOSS to compete with), and GIMP would have had more investment (in terms of money and dev hours). I'm certainly happy GIMP isn't completely abandoned, at the very least.
I think you might be equivocating these on their names, but it's simply not the same. People complain about the name of GIMP because it causes them problems when trying to use it in work and school. But nobody is complaining about GIMPS name, right? It's not even software.
"R----d" is usually just called "the R word", while "the hard R" refers specifically to the standard version of "the N word". (As opposed to "the soft A", which is sometimes used synonymous with "dude".)