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20 Years of GIMP (gimp.org)
jones_supa writes: Back in 1995, University of California students Peter Mattis and Kimball Spencer were members of the eXperimental Computing Facility, a Berkeley campus organization. In June of that year, the two hinted at their intentions to write a free graphical image manipulation program as a means of giving back to the free software community. On November 21st, 20 years ago today, Peter Mattis announced the availability of the "General Image Manipulation Program" on Usenet (later "GNU Image Manipulation Program"). Over the years, GIMP amassed a huge amount of new features designed for all kinds of users and practical applications: general image editing, retouching and color grading, digital painting, graphic design, science imaging, and so on. To celebrate the 20th anniversary, there is an update of the current stable branch of GIMP. The newly released version 2.8.16 features support for layer groups in OpenRaster files, fixes for layer groups support in PSD, various user interface improvements, OSX build system fixes, translation updates, and more.
And Sadly its about 10 years since the developers pretty much stopped listening to the users, and 5 years since development ground to a halt.
Pity really, it was hijacked by a group of people with 'certain ideas' of how everything must be, and no willingness to compromise with the general user base.
After that, less and less developers contribute, the user base shrunk (or at best stopped growing).
3.0 has become a sad joke.
All of which is a great great pity. Compare it with Blender, with a healthy and energetic user and developer base, a continuous flow of real and useful new features, and a rapidly growing and actively using user base.
The day GIMP started trying to force people to save in its own proprietary format (to the great unhappiness of a large portion of its user base) rather than the format the file was OPENED in pretty much marks its death.
The parent comment actually does make a very good, and relevant, point: the open source community would have been much better off if GTK+ had never been developed. From its very beginning it wasn't much more than a really bad rip-off of Motif, a toolkit which itself was already considered ancient and awful at that time. Things only went downhill from there. GTK+ begat GNOME, which only served to split the open source desktop community. Those who wanted a solid, reliable, usable desktop environment backed Qt and KDE. Those who were ideologically driven went with GTK+, although inferior to Qt, and GNOME, although inferior to KDE. This is true even today, so many years later. Qt and KDE are seen as the premiere GUI toolkit and desktop environment, while GTK+ and GNOME play second fiddle. If GIMP had used Qt instead of GTK+, it would've been much more successful. It would've been faster, easier to develop, and would've been portable to more systems. Even today, GTK+ is terrible on OS X and Windows, yet Qt is, for all intents and purposes, essentially native on all of the platforms it supports. It's sometimes claimed that GTK+ being written in C allows for easier bindings for other languages, yet all of the GTK+ bindings are utter shit. Even Gtkmm, the C++ binding for GTK+, is terrible, and it's the binding that should be easiest to have made since almost all C code is a subset of C++! All of the effort put into GTK+ and GNOME has been a total waste. Doing a poor job of imitating Motif was never a good thing. The creation of an entire desktop environment on this mediocre toolkit didn't help, either. And here we are, 2 decades later, and Linux still has no presence on the desktop because of the ideologically-driven schism that GTK+ and GNOME forced on the community that was otherwise very happy using Qt and KDE.
I tried using GIMP, I really did. I gave it several good chances, struggled with the docs, struggled learning the hotkeys, struggled with the sometimes-different names for stuff in the interface, etc etc...I really did. But I just couldn't use it as fluidly and as productively as either Photoshop or CorelDraw.
Maybe it was me, maybe it wasn't...all I know is I liked the idea of a truly open-source graphics tool and I would have been happy to support it but I just never really felt like I was getting in the groove with it, so to speak.
And then Photoshop started coming out with boatloads of brushes and plugins and filters that did some genuinely cool and useful stuff, and I just stopped using GIMP. I had stuff to do and for whatever reason I found I could always manage to do it in Photoshop faster and more easily than GIMP. I don't know why.
There are also about a billion tutorials on Photoshop available (some good, some that suck) and I could almost always find a page with info on what I needed to do in Photoshop. Sadly, the same simply wasn't true of GIMP. The docs were "eh" but the lack of a good tutorial base was a major stumbling block for me personally.
I'm probably not the only one to go through this. I really liked the idea of using GIMP but it just never really coalesced for me.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
From the perspective of someone who uses the GIMP daily, Photoshop utterly sucks, on the rare occasions I try to use it. Mainly it's because I don't use it daily and I'm not used to it, so I can't find anything and the workflow seems unintuitive. That's the thing with complicated software: you have to use it enough to get comfortable with it. You stick with Photoshop; you probably need the small number of things it does that the GIMP doesn't do, whereas I don't. I'll stick with the GIMP because I can't afford Photoshop, I don't need that small number of things, I don't trust Adobe not to fill my system with unwanted crap, and I absolutely hate their horrible update processes.
Don't forget that the project's widget library, the GIMP Toolkit, became one of the most popular widget libraries, and spawned GNOME as well.