lynndotpy

That's fair, it's likely not _everybody_ would have a problem. But _enough_ people would. There are contexts where I've had no problems (e.g. in an office where every cubicle had at least one Linux machine, plenty of people had already heard of GIMP).

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 "Do people commonly understand 'gimp' as a derogatory word?" is the wrong question.

The right question is, "Did _enough_ people understand 'gimp' as a derogatory word to harm its adoption?" and the answer is probably yes.

The people complaining about GIMP's name are the ones who love and use it, who have seen the name cause problems. There's a modicum of grief for the counterfactual (of how much better GIMP might be if it didn't set up artificial barriers for itself), and the frustration with people who obstinately don't see the problem.

The difference is that git was among the best-in-class and developed and used by the people behind Linux, and that the word 'git' wasn't as offensive as 'gimp'.

If GIMP had feature-parity with Photoshop, and had been adopted by Condé Nast or ILM, and had a less-offensive name like "Dumm" or "Silly Image Editor", then this would be more comparable.

No need to apologize, you didn't know. In either case, it doesn't matter whether or not Pulp Fiction is "mainstream".

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".

Yes, I cited it an above comment: https://www.xach.com/gg/1997/1/profile/1/

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.

I'm gen Z, we know what Pulp Fiction is. Even the gen alphas do. We just had a crossover in Fortnite, and Pulp Fiction is in the Chainsaw Man opening.

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.

How would any of this apply to GIMPS?

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.

To repeat, it's not a collision, because it was not accidental. Kimball and Mattis named their image editor after the full-body sex-slave suit, on purpose. GIMP is a backronym.

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.

This is not true, I am in America and the name has been seriously problematic.

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.

Tangent, but it might help you avoid an embarrassing situation later on. If someone says "They called me the hard-R", they're not talking about the R-word.

"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".)

You might be happy to learn that GIMP is a lot better on Mac with the 3.0 release than it was before. When I started using a Mac in 2022 I was a bit heartbroken at broken bits of the UI. I started using Affinity as a compromise, but its UX was just too janky and slow for me compared to GIMP.

Some things are wonky though (ctrl+ keybindings instead of cmd+ keybindings) but it's much better. I use it every day now.

"Names don't matter" is obviously a silly stance. Pre-emptively dismissing people who disagree as "not serious" when you're taking a stance like this does not make an argument in favor of your stance.

Names are something that clearly matter to people, and that impacts anyone working with people.

GIMP and its UI are the only material here, what are you talking about? These are pain points about GIMP that multiple people have brought up every time GIMP has been mentioned online for decades.

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.

While I agree, and I've been hammering this point as a GIMP user for two decades I think the "GIMP is actually a fine name" are increasingly a minority. Its name makes GIMP hostile to user adoption. Anyone who works in a primarily English-spekaing country knows what it's like to try to use GIMP at work, especially in K-12.

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.

Yes! But I do agree, six or seven units are not enough.

Extending the music analogy, we could call those powers of two "octaves", and divide it into twelve exponentially-spaced steps (i.e. 2^(years/12)).

The break even is about 75 steps (i.e. six octaves and three steps), which is about 76 years, since 2^(75/12) = 76.1.

I like the use of the Weber-Fechner law, that's a lens I use to think of age as well :) The idea is that experienced time is proportional to log time, i.e. it's why time seems to move faster as we age. You could even measure your age in powers of two, like we do octaves.

I've been gaming on Linux since 2020 on an Nvidia GPU with no problems, including some AAA titles like Overwatch and Halo.

> "Intelligence is the new spec."

Oof.

Very upfront: "Don't pay attention to RAM, processor, battery, monitor, price, etc. We're not telling you that, because you'd laugh. We're selling access to web services. Lower your expectations, get excited for AI. Please clap".

Very rough. Moore's lesser-known cousin, Les, predicted transistor density-per-dollar would actually start to decrease over time. I guess Google's ready for that world?

And even the most virulently pro-AI people I know aren't using any of these services Google is trying to market as sexy. Who is this for? "Make a band poster for my kid", could they have chosen a sadder example?

It doesn't help that the first result on Google for "Google book" is Google Books. Even their "AI overview" is helpfully telling me about the specifications and pricetags of books on Google Books.

For someone unfamiliar, it's also worth noting this term is used pretty loosely. (I'm guilty of this too!) E.g. Before Rivals of Aether, the same dev made a Smash clone in the GameBoy artstyle and controlset. It's understood as a 'demake' but it's a PC game and is designed for platforms way more powerful than an N64.

I love this kind of thing :) I finally have a second site to bookmark alongside this similar collection: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots

For anyone confused, this is (very good imo) fiction about supply-chain incidents. It had me very worried during a brief scan that it was real though, which made me read it more attentively :)

To add onto these answers, there were some notable "outsider art" additions to math around this time.

A few months before this post, Futurama contributed a new proof to the mathematical canon (for "The Prisoner of Benda"), resolving the conflict of the episode.

Almost a year after posting this, a 4chan user solved a previously-unsolved superpermutation (combinatorics) problem in a discussion about anime.

I think everyone who has thought about math seriously has felt similarly to the OP. It was impressed upon me early on that there are combinatorically (hah) many combinatorics problems to be solved and that these were just a few.

I haven't been keeping tabs for the entirety of Linux development, but has it ever happened before that someone dropped a working exploit from the mailing list before the patch even hit the kernel?

I haven't seen this kind of thing and I get the impression, despite all the hype, that this will be a frequent phenomenon now thanks to LLMs.

With an Anthropic engineer salary netting them about $200 per hour, yeah. Multiple people from Anthropic got eyes on this and saw it was no biggy.

It makes sense if you understand, to their eyes, that $200 is more like $10.

No, it might sound smart, but it's incorrect to equivocate. You don't need to "lock in" to Apple's services either. Apple has a meaningfully better track record than Google on privacy in many regards.

(Apple's Terms of Service is also much better, for not having an arbitration clause anywhere except the Apple credit card, with a very easy opt-out flow.)

Yep, AFAIK this is the only working choice on Android. (I could be wrong!)

I used to build custom apps for my Android all the time, install APKs, transfer files over USB, use USB tethering on my Linux computer, torrent, use a mouse and keyboard (I think iOS can do this now though), use the integrated terminal, etc.

A few years ago, iOS lacked basic features like widgets, NFC, calculator on their tablets, etc. And iOS still has a completely inferior keyboard (I used to write code and essays on my Android while walking) and a completely inferior notification system. Androids are also the only phones still offering a fingerprint scanner, which is way better for me. These nice things all combine well with the oppenness.

What's worse is that we're clearly in a progression of restriction. Bootloader restrictions, app installation restrictions, "age verification" requirements, etc. Openness is being locked down from every angle with serious momentum, it's not anticipated to stop here.

I'll bite.

For me, Google services are not an option, so my Android experience is sans-Google.

Until September 2025, I'd say iOS had actually gotten better than Android.

CalDAV, CardDAV, and SMB are baked into iOS, whereas these are onerous to set up on Android. These are very very nice protocols, and I use them all daily. (Contacts, Calendars, Notes, Reminders, and Files.)

Apple's developer ecosystem lacks the FOSS devs that make F-Droid so good, but they do have a number of devs who release paid apps with zero tracking, which is very nice. It's often the case an app exists on iOS as a $5 one-time fee with a two-paragraph privacy policy for which one does not exist on Fdroid.

Shortcuts work well enough, homescreen customization is good enough, etc. that a number of the original Android draws are gone. There are a number of points where iOS and Android are equals now.

iCloud's E2EE photo backup is something I reluctantly started using and found to be very nice, after having had de-Googled in 2018. I miss having my photos auto-upload and be available on other devices, and Apple has had iCloud Web for awhile. This is nicer than the options I have on Android.

And while Android's notification-panel tiles have gotten worse over the years (down from six to two controls on the first swipe, this was what alienated me and got me to try iOS), iOS now has a much denser "control center".

The big caveat is the gigantic regression that is iOS 26. The phone is slower, it kills battery, the native apps are constantly crashing, the lockscreen and homescreen often have broken navigation flows, etc. It's a travesty that never should have been released and iOS is easily worse than Android right now. If someone needed a phone today, I couldn't recommend an iPhone, but that might change with iOS 27.

For an Android user, iOS offers better privacy (which can change at any time), but it also comes baked in with better support for some open protocols. (SMB on Files, and CalDAV/CardDAV for Calendars/Contacts/Notes integration). This has been the case for years, while aspects of the 'walled garden' have eroded over time.

It's natural that this huge Android regression might be enough for someone to dip their toes into the other side.

In addition to what others have said, it means some developers who were building for Android are going to stop. You can't install an app when someone is obstructed from building it in the first place.

> every Android app developer must register centrally with Google before their software can be installed on any device. Not just Play Store apps: all apps.

> Registration requires:

> Paying a fee to Google

> Agreeing to Google's Terms and Conditions

> Surrendering your government-issued identification

> Providing evidence of your private signing key

> Listing all current and all future application identifiers

Google is not an entity you can can trust with this.