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.

Comments

gtk is for cows

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:gtk is for cows

[Anonymous Coward]

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Sadly..

[thesupraman]

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.

Re:Sadly..

[ickleberry]

Once a big happy opensource community project gets too big or successful infighting and and "telling the user what they want" become an irresistable temptation for too many, particularly for those not at the coalface and who have floated up towards a more managerial role.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Also GNOME, Mozilla, systemd, and so many of the, "Tomorrow belongs to me!" crowd of spoilt geeks who think just because they were successful in their 20s now have reached a nirvana of technocratic wisdom.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Never quite understood the why of that. Yeah, xcf is a nice format which can save all those fancy layers and whatnot. However in 90% of my use cases I just want to crop some jpeg or add a watermark and similar trvial stuff.
Otherwise I can't quite follow your reasoning, GIMP continues to work, single window mode was a nice addition, the functionality is still there - nothing a casual user could complain about.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they have don't you think?

Re:Sadly..

[canuck_spud]

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.

It doesn't "mark its death" at all. Lots of us continue to use the GIMP daily, and are more or less happy with it, while simultaneously being a bit annoyed by the decision to try to push the native file format on us through the interface. Since the menu option to overwrite the opened file was added, it's much less annoying. It's such a common thing on Slashdot to announce the complete failure of a long-term project just on the basis that the poster and his friends (if he has any) are annoyed by one or two changes that didn't suit them. There should be a word for it. The GIMP is a very useful, highly functional, stable and reliable piece of software. It's not perfect, but nothing is. Get some perspective.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

The first big open source project to start the general rot. I just hope that when the new projects, from those that refused to work with project management, gets going they can avoid getting reinfested firefox style.

Re:Sadly..

[93 Escort Wagon]

I haven't used gimp for a number of years... but it seems most common image editing tools choose their own proprietary format by default (photoshop and pixelmator immediately come to mind) - so I'm not sure why gimp should be any different. And they all make it easy to choose a different format for export... which I bet gimp does as well. While it may be annoying at times, it is understandable - I don't see why it would be a deal breaker.

Re:Sadly..

[chipschap]

I still find GIMP highly useful, perhaps more so than ever, and I like the price compared to being robbed by Adobe and forced to use an OS that I wish to avoid.

No, I'm not a high end visual artist, I just need to do some things at a medium level of expertise. GIMP works for that and I'm glad to have it. Maybe if I was a high-ender I'd have a different opinion, but most of us are not.

XCF? Who cares. It's not hard to save and also do an export. I'm sure the point of XCF is to not lose information.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole "oh right, I have to click export now" thing is definitely annoying, but I think the real problem is they more or less stopped making real progress and just kinda worked on polishing what they had.

By itself that isn't a bad thing. Gimp still does what it does, it still works for casual image editing, and if you are really keen you can do cool things with it (artist not the tool and all). I think a lot of us just remember back when Gimp was a realistic competitor to photoshop. It never quite got there, but there was a time when the argument could be made that it might. These days photoshop is miles in the lead whereas Gimp still has the same basic features it did in 2000. Comparing gimp to photoshop at this point is like comparing ms paint to photoshop.

It went from an example of how open source could produce software that competed with the big guys to evidence that several offices of paid staff is often necessary at a certain complexity.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

>There should be a word for it.

I propose itsoveritis syndrome, the tendency to yell "IT'S OVER $BIG_THING IS FINISHED!" at the slightest hint of a negative thing.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be using DarkTable or Lightroom then

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

And they all make it easy to choose a different format for export... which I bet gimp does as well.

Thing is they don't. Most tools (photo editing or otherwise) use the same save dialog and will usually automatically switch to the right format based on the extension you give (and if you opened a file, usually default to that file/file type).

In gimp, it's an entirely different menu item, meaning pretty much 100.1% of the time you go to save an image, you do ctrl+s, mumble "oh fuck sakes", close it, then open the "export" dialog. It's a tiny annoyance but it builds over time. It feels like the tool is trying to force you to use it's format (which the vast majority of the time you don't want to do). It's kind of like how the newer Microsoft Office suite keeps bugging you to save stuff to the cloud. It's nothing to click whatever it is you click to get to your hard drive, but it still pissed people off when they have to do it multiple times a day.

Re: Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if the default is different that the original format, saving lets you choose a different format on most apps. Is it the same on GIMP or do you have to use a different menu option?

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes... well GIMP uses some algorithms when adjusting color balance and levels that, when compared to photoshop, are the real "sad joke". Blocky artifacting is the order of the day, so much that I typically wonder how the features could even be provided in the software if they are guaranteed to introduce that kind of distortion (I'd consider it a bug in many cases). Photoshop always gives smooth color gradients no matter how much you mangle things (ok, it won't always look GOOD, but it at least looks like they tried)

Complaining about the XCF file format is the most ridiculous thing I've heard about, however. Like it's SO HARD to it ctrl+e instead of ctrl+s.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to the "Tomorrow belongs to me!" crowd of geeks that were *not* successful in their 20s?

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Lack of feature is bad, but it's not infuriating like opening the wrong save dialog every single time because some smartass decided the save option you actually want should be ^E instead of ^S.
Death by a thousand cut is a thing, but gimp is like death by a hundred giant razor blades. The UI is just consistently much worse than it ought to be.

Re:Sadly..

[xonen]

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.[...]Compare it with Blender, [..] a continuous flow of real and useful new features

I'm actually happy that the Gimp is resilient to changes just for the sake of changes. I does what it has to do and it does it very well. It has great support for various file formats. Never crashes. Can do all kind of neat tricks and if it can't you can write or download a filter to do it.

And best of all: it doesn't bother me to learn `new improved` interface. The Gimp of 2015 is about the same as 10 years ago, with only minor conservative changes - for better or for worse - to the user interface. While i partly agree that save/export should have been combined in same menu, it's also a very minor inconvenience and actually a good habit to save your work before you export to some format that looses information.

So, if you are happy with an alternative, sure. Not everybody willing to pull a thousand $ for software and a mac. I - and many others - are very happy with Gimp just as it is and regard it as a properly maintained project. It requires some learning to unlock all abilities and know all tricks, but that's with all feature rich software.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

The point being that neither success nor failure in youth should be interpreted as leading to wisdom in older age. Unfortunately, far too much faith is placed in those who are both young and successful, even when they're just repeating old, seductive mistakes.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

With that tale of woe you're talking about systemd right?

Re:Sadly..

[Billly Gates]

You know what is odd?

In the old days of Linux being new turn of the century all these things were new and many forks existed. Someone didn't like KDE? Then create Gnome. Didn't like WindowMaker? Make Enlightenment. Linux users laughed at those on Windows tied into their app ecosystems saying if it were opensource Office, IE, SAP, Oracle, wouldn't be so impossible to leave etc.

Today no one wants to fork. Things are mature and stable. users fear change. Looking at FOSS in 2015 I hate to say this but Linux grew into the WIndows ecosystem. One app for graphics, gimp. . One app for a gui, gnome. One app for an ide Eclipse, etc. True with the gui part someone will say they use featureX. But for 85% of users things tied to stuff like gnome can't leave so easily. Just like some law firm probably runs Wordperfect somewhere today. But MS word is thee word processing app.

What happened? Or did the kids who thought pcs were cool in 1998 are old farts who have jobs and newer kids want to make newer mobile apps for their phones and do not care about legacy pcs anymore?

Re:Sadly..

[arielCo]

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.

Feel free to correct me, but GIMP doesn't have the kind of sponsors that Blender has. But the help you get in the forums involves a lot of "works for me" defensiveness and that drives users away.

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.

Native, not proprietary (the spec is out there and you're free to write readers/writers for it). Do you know of any other open format that preserves the structure of a GIMP doc?

As for writing back to the original format, I just opened a random PNG to double-check. Sure enough, under the File menu, Save (Control-S) and Save As... are for saving to XCF (so you don't lose any GIMP features you've built on top of it). Then you have Overwrite foo.png which does exactly what you want and Export As... which lets you pick a new name. Just remember that, just like with Libre|OpenOffice, opening another format is actually an import operation.

That's not where my gripes lie. For example, using the Text tool is akin to waltzing on a messy car repair shop and the font picker is an unhelpful eyesore. Installing plugins is anything but foolproof. My memory fails me right now but I'm sure you guys can pick up from here.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true. Gimp is fine for anything 2D. Also one can write a plugin in python if a function is missing. Plus if someone needs a modern GUI there's always Krita.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using GIMP for years, and when I got my new comp I was ticked at the changes. I didn't know about Blender, I just downloaded it, thanks!

Re:Sadly..

[binarstu]

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.

Have you even used GIMP recently? If you open a file in GIMP that is not in GIMP's native XCF format, there is an "Overwrite image_file_name" option in the "File" menu that does exactly what you want (i.e., does exactly what the "Save" option used to do).

Re: Sadly..

[pjt33]

It used to be the same Save dialog. Then they changed it, so now Save is .xcf and anything else requires Export.

Re:Sadly..

[exomondo]

I think it's more that the excitement is gone from a lot of these projects, the work they require is maintenance and minor feature upgrades to try and keep up with the proprietary competitors - Photoshop in this instance. Developers that spend their free time doing development want to do interesting things, not mundane ones. You need a revenue stream to get developers to do the boring work done, FOSS is supposed to provide this through users paying to get features implemented and bugs fixed but this just isn't reality in the vast majority of cases so ultimately the projects stagnate and users abandon them rather than pay them.

Re:Sadly..

[exomondo]

because some smartass decided the save option you actually want should be ^E instead of ^S.

It's open source! Changing the shortcut for Save and Export would be trivial and you could just merge your patch into your private branch on each release. What is the point of open source if this is actually a genuine complaint?

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the problem I think is apps went from small and purpose specific to monolithic and intertwined again. I know the "unix philosophy" argument is old, and don't worry, I'm not an unblinking subscriber to it (chaining commands together via pipes isn't practical for a large number of use cases), but the core idea of having separate things that do one thing well made it easy to swap out the bits you didn't like is still solid.

But now look what we've got. All the major desktop environment are tightly knitted together. It's very hard to use a piece from kde or gnome without dragging in a tonne of dependencies and background services and (in the case of gnome) a specific init system. Even the lighter weight WMs are starting to get this way. And then there's shit like systemd, which is basically doing everything it can to become an impossible to replace chunk of everyone's system.

Basically I feel like at some point everyone decided mass adoption was the big goal, and we started sacrificing the things that attracted a lot of us to Linux in the first place to make Linux more friendly for the masses. Your non-geek likes a cohesive environment and a standard stack of software, and this is how you get there. Personally I'll be a holdout, over here with Gentoo and OpenRC and a bodged together environment for as long as I can, but the tide is definitely coming.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, it's ok-ish for most stuff. Sure the interface is a crime against humanity (or possibly just years ahead of its time, as some ipad apps seem to be catching up in terms of obtuseness) , and yes maybe they've stopped adding features, but most of the stuff you need is there if you're willing to google for it, it's free, and the interface is at least consistently horrid rather than moving-target disasterous.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I don't even particularly like the interface - it's annoying, options can be hard to find, and I absolutely hate having all the random bits strewn all over my desktop rather than neatly contained in a program window - but at least its consistent. And to be blunt having seen what some people think is the way forward in terms of interfaces I would actually rather be stuck with this than "modernised" into some god-awful un-discoverable mess of obtuse icons, actively hidden features and whatever some adhd impaired kiddie-veloper through was the latest ooh shiny.

Re:Sadly..

[Mass Overkiller]

I think your last sentence is spot on. Us "old farts" spent hours, weeks, months playing, installing, compiling, hacking together FOSS projects like GIMP and Gnome and Slackware. Now I'm at the old age of 40 and I just want the shit to work. I don't have the time or desire to "work" on software projects anymore. I just want whatever it is I need to just work. My days of playing with Linux boxen are pretty much over. It's not because I'm being a jerk or I got suckered into a Windows or Mac garden. Its just that my time is spent with my family and watching my kid grow up. When she's old enough to use a computer I'll show her how I did things "back in the old bastard days" and I'm sure she'll laugh at my antiquated techniques etc. Like I laugh at those old farts who used to use punch cards for their 'input'.

Re:Sadly..

[Mass Overkiller]

I think you make an interesting point. No one wants to maintain this stuff anymore. It's not fun. I am happy to pay people to add or fix features to the software I use. But my days of taking the source code and rolling my own distro are long gone.

Re:Sadly..

[ChrisMaple]

winehq claims that Photoshop CS6 runs under wine at the gold level (i.e. most things work but there are some problems). Practically, that means if photoshop has some function you really need and you absolutely refuse to use Microsoft, you can get it under wine but it won't be convenient.

Re:Sadly..

[Zero__Kelvin]

"One app for graphics, gimp. . One app for a gui, gnome. One app for an ide Eclipse, etc."

It is impossible to take you seriously after such a blatantly and phenomenally absurd claim. There are many, many, many choices for the Linux user in each of those three categories.

Re:Sadly..

[ChrisMaple]

You don't even need to patch. Shortcuts are configurable.

Re:Sadly..

[Kjella]

You know what is odd? (...) Today no one wants to fork. Things are mature and stable. users fear change. Looking at FOSS in 2015 I hate to say this but Linux grew into the WIndows ecosystem. One app for graphics, gimp. . One app for a gui, gnome. One app for an ide Eclipse, etc. True with the gui part someone will say they use featureX. But for 85% of users things tied to stuff like gnome can't leave so easily. Just like some law firm probably runs Wordperfect somewhere today. But MS word is thee word processing app. What happened?

Primarily, the world went dynamic. We plug in and pull out all kinds of devices, accessories, monitors and whatnot, we pair up with Bluetooth and WiFi, we change power states, sleep states and so on. That kinda requires an IPC system and event loop, which is neither core C/C++ nor POSIX. The other part is that we want global settings for consistency. To be honest, I don't know how I could write an application that "plays nice" without using some kind of framework. If the framework shouldn't provide it, you need a much bigger global system API for applications to interact with. But then that'd probably be accused of trying to be the one ring to rule them all.

Re:Sadly..

[nnull]

I gave up when they said GIMP is not a going to compete against Photoshop, they just want to edit gif for websites. That was years ago and I'm sure they still have the same mentality. I stopped caring for GIMP and since then, it sucks even more.

Blender on the other hand is amazingly pretty great. The community is great and hasn't been taken over by morons. Now if we could only get the Blender life, developer base and ideas to make something better than Photoshop and lightroom, I'm all for it. GIMP is definitely not it.

Re:Sadly..

[ChrisMaple]

When gimp finally completes the transition to 16-bit internals, many visible problems are going to disappear. Blocks or banding as a result of color adjustments should go away.

Re:Sadly..

[mikael]

There are plenty of people who care about legacy PC's. There are dozens of light-weight distro's of Linux that run on old PC's. But these guys just take a standard Linux distribution, scoop out the packages they don't want and bundle it on a live CD, DVD or memory stick. They don't try and do anything with a modern clean GUI, or perhaps they can't because at the bottom of all the GUI systems is the "nouveau" graphics driver that comes built into many kernels as an alternative to Nvidia's blobware.

  I have an old laptop (NVidia Ti5600, 32-bit PAE, dual-core hyperthreaded 2.8 GHz CPU). The only OS that runs on that laptop is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Anything else usually chokes on nouveau (I know nouveau can be blacklisted).

With latest systems (so new they don't even have ALSA sound drivers or keyboard backlight support), Ubuntu 12+ and Linux Mint 17 are the cleanest UI's that I have seen - mainly because all the menu bars are slim. It makes X-window/Motif look clunky, while Windows XP looks like a childrens toy. Having clean polished set of icons takes a lot of work. I really can't see anything that can be improved.

  Old PC's still have GPU acceleration, but even there, the various standards such as GLX, OpenGL are completed different from what is available now (vertex buffer objects vs display lists, framebuffer objects vs. standard framebuffer), so that it would be very difficult to have one modern GUI system that would run
at a decent speed on old platforms while still having all the flash of a new platform.

Re: Sadly..

[Spugglefink]

This is a clear case of irritatingly pedantic developer vs. user who just wants to do something. I've been on both sides of the coin, and it isn't always easy to see a clear way forward. I feel they got it wrong in this case.

Re:Sadly..

[exomondo]

Even easier then!

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comments sound like it is about 10 years since you have used GIMP. I have used it regularly for 10 years, and the latest 2.8 release is very good. The so called "proprietary" format saves in the format it is working in so that all the elements are still there. It now has the "Overwrite.." feature which will allow you to open a file, and then save it back in the same format.

What is wrong with having a native format? Do you want it to work in PhotoShop format? That is proprietary and closed and GIMP has done a great job of reverse engineering it so that at least you get the layers even if some of the bump-map and other stuff has to be rendered in.

I use Inkscape, GIMP and Scribus all the time now and have never needed anything else. I'm not a graphic artist and don't do animation so I don't need anything more. I use these tools for photography and DTP. Back in the day I was using Quark, PhotoShop, Corel, etc. I would not go back.

Re:Sadly..

[Jiro]

In a normal program, the program warns you if you modify a file and then try to close the program without saving. Because you have to export instead of saving, this warning becomes useless.

Re:Sadly..

[nickweller]

This must have happened in some parallel universe.

Re:Sadly..

[chipschap]

The warning isn't useless at all. You don't "have to export instead of saving." You do both. You save your work, then export when ready.

Re:Sadly..

[exomondo]

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.

Which would be a problem if it were closed source yet this is exactly the reason we always hear that programs should be open source, so that things you don't like can be changed and/or improved.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

For comments like this I would like to open an account and Mod +10000... But since this happens every 11.22 the urge pass away.

PRINT, people.

Is the word that keeps me to use this program (and even move to linux). I print posters, papers, cards and photos for a small office. So I cannot hang a PDF or PNG in a wall. And this crap doesn't know how to handle colors at all, print a photo and all the reds become the RGB #FF0000 or I need a 5x4" image and this thing prints 1x2" and no choice to change that.

So don't cry that people still uses Photoshop or Corel. In the real word we do more than banners for memes or websites.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

vim is the only choice as it can handle all three use cases. ;-)

Re:Sadly..

[tepples]

So how do you tell whether you've changed the image since exporting?

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

I hadn't upgraded Gimp in a long time and as soon as I did I regretted it. I do work on images with a lot of layers sometimes, but I mostly do a lot of pixel art which doesn't need to be saved in .xcf. The whole thing was a disaster. If you had multiple files opened it would never properly remember the path when importing and exporting files.

Luckily, it took 5 minutes to restore the old method of only having a save dialog where you can save in any format. It will take a little more effort to make it an option in the preferences dialog. (Does anybody even like that "feature"?)

I've always found the text tool a bit odd. It would be way cooler if there was a way to automagically do a letterpress effect where each letter was rotated and positioned randomly a small (configurable) amount. It's one of many things on my todo list.

The other big thing I want to add is a way to manipulate the hue of an indexed palette while keeping the palette in the same order.

Re:Sadly..

[dbIII]

so that it would be very difficult to have one modern GUI system that would run at a decent speed on old platforms while still having all the flash of a new platform.

Apart from things like Enlightenment, the window manager that Rob Malda posted things about before he started Slashdot, a window manager that has been changed and updated a lot and still performs on slow hardware. It even uses OpenGL if you let it.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

So how do you tell whether you've changed the image since exporting?

Is this a problem you actually have or are you just trying to invent problems? It's no different to if you save to multiple formats, it is something that has existed since the ability to save to multiple formats. If you feel it is a problem then you can modify GIMP to have the ability to warn you since it is open source.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

So fork it and make it better. If your version addresses things people care about it will become popular and displace GIMP. If your version doesn't displace GIMP then maybe your concerns are not shared by the general user base, but at least you'll have software that works the way you want. This is in large part the point of open source software.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

The real reality to face here is that Gimp was never that good to begin with when compared to its competition. Literally the only thing it had going for it was the fact that you didn't have to pay for it. Unfortunately that is not enough. No professional in their right mind prefers it because it's a substandard product.

Re:Sadly..

[kwbauer]

Wait, Free is supposed to mean getting users to pay? I guess I'm old fashioned because to me "free" equals "not paid for".

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

No one forks, everyone wants to make it themselves from the beginning. The problem is, that's rarely going to translate into version 1.0. So there are hundreds of any program in beta, but no one finishes them.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Vi? Are you crazy? Everyone knows emacs is far superior.

Re:Sadly..

[caseih]

Wasn't there a story a couple of years ago about Adobe releasing the ancient versions of some of their products, including PS6 for free on their FTP site or something? If so, then you certainly could run PS6 in wine for free for simple jobs.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

So when is blender going to get a usable UI? Last time they said they made changes, i didn't see much difference, so i gave up.

Re:Sadly..

[Blaskowicz]

To be fair, I had pain with word processors that warn you that "warning, you will lose important information blah-blah because you're saving in .rtf".
Fine, but the only complicated thing was a table with two columns and some "underlining". Single page document with nothing really going on.
Now, why the hell couldn't it interoperate cleanly between AbiWord and Libreoffice or Word and Libreoffice? Or seemingly, LibreOffice with itself?
Now I still have at least one version of the RTF document that mattered, but it is mangled (slightly, but I would have to study the underlying structure or install and try several word processors)

Lesson learned : only use the native file format (likely .odt) or don't use a word processor in the first place.

Re:Sadly..

[Zero__Kelvin]

WTF? I never mentioned vi.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not true at all. We've never had so much to choose from when it comes do DEs:

Ununtu's Unity
Gnome (and its Shell)
KDE
Xfce
LXDE
MATE
Cinnamon
Openbox (and other 3rd party dockers and panels as you see fit)
Enlightenment

and you can use any "app" on whatever of those.

IDEs? Besides Vim, Emacs, Eclipse and Netbeans, there are plenty of others, and new ones all the time. Not to mention the browser-based ones that seem to be gaining popularity.

There are plenty of forks going on all the time.

Gimp hasn't been forked or abandoned yet because it's still quite good, and has, in fact, improved quite a bit in the last couple of years.

Nothing happened, grandpa. You're just getting old, that's all. I'll be leaving your lawn now...

Re: Sadly..

[thesupraman]

Yes.. But that opens another question.

With the current rates of progress.. Will gegl based gimp as a full release with clean 16 bit be available before or after the heat death of the universe?

I suspect it will be a close call either way.

Development more these days has quite clearly moved into 'tinker with what the development god decided is flavor of the year' mode rather than any actual progress plan. Has been like that for a long long time.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what is odd?

In the old days of Linux being new turn of the century all these things were new and many forks existed. Someone didn't like KDE? Then create Gnome. Didn't like WindowMaker? Make Enlightenment. Linux users laughed at those on Windows tied into their app ecosystems saying if it were opensource Office, IE, SAP, Oracle, wouldn't be so impossible to leave etc.

Today no one wants to fork. Things are mature and stable. users fear change. Looking at FOSS in 2015 I hate to say this but Linux grew into the WIndows ecosystem. One app for graphics, gimp. . One app for a gui, gnome. One app for an ide Eclipse, etc. True with the gui part someone will say they use featureX. But for 85% of users things tied to stuff like gnome can't leave so easily. Just like some law firm probably runs Wordperfect somewhere today. But MS word is thee word processing app.

What happened? Or did the kids who thought pcs were cool in 1998 are old farts who have jobs and newer kids want to make newer mobile apps for their phones and do not care about legacy pcs anymore?

Sadly, I think a lot of the young time to burn devs are going mobile.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

And no one will be around to witness that day as anyone that needs a painting program for linux has already bought Mari leaving the hobbyists to whine on slashdot like it is still 2000.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Free as in free use, not free as in free beer...

Re:Sadly..

[graphius]

pretty much spot on. I would add that GIMP scripts are nowhere near as easy or useful as Photoshop actions.
GIMP has many quirks, and you can do a lot of things but most of the time creating the same effect is easier and/or faster in Photoshop.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the right tool for the job. Simple stuff is easier with imagemagick.

Re:Sadly..

[serviscope_minor]

It's also that once your pool of users gets large enough collectively they want EVERYTHING no matter how contradictory those things are.

I've never given a rat's arse about CMYK for example, because essentially everything I do winds up on screen not in print.

I also don't give a rat's arse about the Photoshop UI because I have literally never seen it, never used it and I'm certainly not used to it, nor do I want to re-learn the UI.

Finally, I have a good quality window manager (FVWM), so those bad features which are designed to make GIMP work better on low quality window managers (Windows ports, Gnome) are not only of no interest to me but actively harmful.

I would say that those three things (which while carefully selected are 100% true) are more or less diametrically opposed to what a quite large fraction of GIMP users seem to want, with the last two being mutually exclusive too at lease going by the comments in previous slashdot threads.

There is no way to "listen to your users" when your users want opposite things to each other. Chances are if they listened to me you'd complain that they didn't listen to users and if they listened to you, I'd complain they didn't listen to users.

Re:Sadly..

[serviscope_minor]

Which would be a problem if it were closed source yet this is exactly the reason we always hear that programs should be open source, so that things you don't like can be changed and/or improved.

It also brings GIMP in line with a lot of professional software. Things like CAD software and whatnot have export like GIMP does. Sure you might be able to re-import but if it loses information, it's in the export menu, not the save menu.

I was mildly irritated when GIMP did it because no one likes having their workflow disturbed, no matter how much the new changes are an improvement. Now I'm used to it, I'd be equally annoyed if they change it back because no one likes having their workflow changed.

Re:Sadly..

[future assassin]

Or did the kids who thought pcs were cool in 1998 are old farts who have jobs and newer kids want to make newer mobile apps for their phones and do not care about legacy pcs anymore?

Every kid (teenager) that I know has a PC/Laptop for in home use and they use their phones away from the PC. They haven’t abandoned the PC as a phone can only do so many things,

Re:Sadly..

[silentcoder]

However if you go and introduce a change which fundamentally opposes 30 years of UI experience for *everybody* you need serious justification.
In basically every program ever written Save saves a file in the format it was opened in, save-as or export lets you change it.
Gnome goes and makes "save" replace the format with their own, and save as ALSO does that but lets you rename... so now you have ot learn to go File/Export even if you opened the file in the proper format in the first place.

Which is an idiotic design because people often have very good reasons for having a particular image in a particular format. If I am making a print-ready photograph it *has* to be in lossless jpeg, because that's the only format the printshops accept, if I open it ot make a tweak, I should NOT need to re-export it to save that tweak.

Re:Sadly..

[serviscope_minor]

In basically every program ever written Save saves a file in the format it was opened in, save-as or export lets you change it.

No. You're flat-out wrong there. A lot of profesional software, for example CAD does not work like that. Save is native format only and NEVER loses information. Information losing always lives in "export". I just fired my copy of Eagle-CAD up and yes, it's as I claim.

File/Export even if you opened the file in the proper format in the first place.

Define: proper. If you opened it in GIMP, the proper format is XCF since that's the only format you can save without loss. Exporting to another format like LJPEG requires compositing into a single layer.

It's a subtle trade-off between maybe having the "right" file format by default and maybe losing information. There's no one right answer, and it's easy to get used to File->Export.

Re: Sadly..

[silentcoder]

The right answer is to trust what the user gives you.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

How is having CMYK support opposite to anything?
Photoshop UI has objectively better usability (much better). You should probably have a look at it before saying you don't want to learn it. (though I don't really care if you do)

So, unless you want GIMP to NOT have CMYK support, and NOT have good usability, I don't see how you requirements are opposite to anybody else.

Re:Sadly..

[silentcoder]

Just a side consideration. If I open a lossless jpeg I had previously exported, and I don't add any layers - what can possibly be lost when saving it ? Anything lossless jpeg couldn't store could not have been there when I opened it in first place.

I could still have understood a "Set a lossy save flag and warn the user if there are changes the format cannot store" approach - but those are relatively rare actually. Like almost every photographer I start with raw format. I then do initial edits in a raw editor (this is basic postprocessing) long before gimp even gets involved. In gimp I do the advanced stuff that I need to get the shot I really want, and then save this in several formats. Usually in XCF - that is the "working copy" I will use if I ever want to make additional edits. But I also typically save in a low quality 800-res lossy jpeg which is for web-use and a high quality 300dpi lossless jpeg pre-sized to page sizes (never trust printer scaling) if I want to do a large print version.
If I am opening the large print version there is absolutely no way I'll be doing any edits that would use masks or layers - because for any such work you use the XCF. Changes to the print version will always be limited to minor tweaks (i.e. it wasn't sized quite the same aspect ratio as paper and I want to make a crop on the edge so I can get a perfect stretchless end-to-end fit on A3). These are not changes that introduce any data that could be lost when saving, indeed I definitely would NOT want those in the XCF - because I made a small crop for this print does not mean I want the image cropped for all time - I may well want the uncropped image for a different use in future).

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Apart from things like Enlightenment, the window manager that Rob Malda posted things about before he started Slashdot, a window manager that has been changed and updated a lot and still performs on slow hardware.

That would have been AfterStep though.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

CorelDRAW had (has? I haven't used it recently) save for saving CDR, and export for everything else.

Re:Sadly..

[KGIII]

Yes, it was conspicuously absent! Heretic! Burn the heretic!

I'm not really a vi or emacs fan. Nor do I like vim. I don't even like nano. I suppose that's largely because I've never really enjoyed using them and never learned to use any of them at anything greater than a rudimentary level. I should like to take some sort of online course in vi, however. I wonder if edX.org has anything on the subject?

I think the point is that, yes, there's a lot of choices still to be had but, for the most part, it's just a limited set of applications that gets the development time, dollars, and attention. The apps that end up being default end up getting the donations. It is just like there's a distro out there for everyone (and, if not, you can use openSuse's online tool to make one) and still, unless they're in the top ten list at DistroWatch, they're not getting much in the way of donations or the likes.

It's unfortunate but that's the way it is. Sure, there are choices but they often suck. We don't all have the time or skills to get something changed. Some of us are willing to pay, to donate at least, for a project to be maintained or even for customization work but we're few and far between. Personally, I'm more likely to donate than I am to freshen up on my coding skills (though that's starting to change). I've even paid for custom work to be done.

I do participate, in small ways, with a few projects and I'm not really privy to, or interested in, their financial information but I'm understanding that it's not too common to get donations for smaller projects. The big distros get the money. The big projects get the money. The one that some guy still does out of love, in his basement, is just languishing more often than not.

I think it was about a year ago that a study was released that showed some 90% of all open source projects (that they could enumerate) were abandoned. I didn't agree with their criteria and I think the number was actually higher than 90% (like 98% or something alarming) but it was still eye-opening. I didn't agree with their process but I think the differences probably wouldn't have been significant.

They took a look at all the public projects on sites like SourceForge, GitHub, and the likes and any project that hadn't had any changes made in a year was considered abandoned. (I didn't agree with the year long period of time. Some software doesn't need updating.) So, while I didn't agree entirely with their conclusions the numbers were still interesting and still valuable as they included a bunch of other results and raw numbers with the study.

Anyway, I think that was their point. It's not that you don't have options, it's just that there aren't many options and the options often aren't very good. Certain things have, for better or worse, become the defacto standard. Things that are installed by default have greater momentum and greater mass. The greater mass attracts more attention and the momentum makes it difficult (not impossible) to get things changed.

I think a good example of something becoming the standard would be systemd. For better or worse, that's what we've got in a lot of distros. Sure, you can work around it and you can find a distro without it but can you find one that's well funded, is reasonably feature complete, has a good ecosystem of pre-compiled software in the repos, and has a good sized community around it? (Choosing BSD is not an option for this rhetorical question.) They're few and far between and likely to get more rare as systemd becomes further entrenched.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's such a common thing on Slashdot to announce the complete failure of a long-term project just on the basis that the poster and his friends (if he has any) are annoyed by one or two changes that didn't suit them. There should be a word for it.

"Idiocy"?

(Not very specific, I admit, but highly descriptive.)

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

In basically every program ever written Save saves a file in the format it was opened in, save-as or export lets you change it.

No. You're flat-out wrong there. A lot of profesional software, for example CAD does not work like that. Save is native format only and NEVER loses information. Information losing always lives in "export". I just fired my copy of Eagle-CAD up and yes, it's as I claim.

Many programs have their own proprietary format but also treats many other formats as first-class citizens and allows you to work with them just as if you were using the vendors own format, this is especially true for image editing programs.

In most decent image editors (which is the family of programs that GIMP happens to belong to) opening a format that is handled natively means that "Save" saves that image into the very same format, overwriting the opened file. The reason to this is obvious when working with embedded files. From program A where you have an embedded file you select "Edit original" which opens up program B. After the edits is done, you save the file. Going back to program A the saved version of the file is embedded since the original file has been updated. This simplifies workflow immensly.

What you describes breaks that paradigm as it does not save the embedded file, instead you have another version of the embedded file in another format and the first program has no chance of knowing that there is new version of the file.

If a format is NOT handled natively, you *import* it, and then Save will not just save the image but rather ask you to name the file, treating it as if you had created a new unnamed file and tries to save it for the first time.

So in almost any program I have used, Open has Save just as Import has Export. Some vendors choose to merge the Open and Import functions, which sometimes make sense.

Also, if you edit an image, and the edits does not warrant a format change (for example, no layers added to a GIF or transparency added to a XBM) there is no reason to force that format change. But if the edits to the image means that the image cannot be saved without losing that information, the program is correct in *suggesting* that the image should be saved in a new format. Photoshop does this. The user can select to save it in the original format (or another format that would discard information) but then the program informs the user that only a copy will be saved, the original editing buffer is intact, allowing you to save again in a format not discarding the information (like the native PSD, TIFF, etc).

File/Export even if you opened the file in the proper format in the first place.

Define: proper. If you opened it in GIMP, the proper format is XCF since that's the only format you can save without loss. Exporting to another format like LJPEG requires compositing into a single layer.

It's a subtle trade-off between maybe having the "right" file format by default and maybe losing information. There's no one right answer, and it's easy to get used to File->Export.

I have very limited experience with different CAD software and the capabilities of different CAD-formats, but when it comes to image files, there are many image formats with identical capabilities. So claiming that a image editing/manipulation program only have one "proper" format is nonsense. It might have one proprietary format, for sure. But proprietary != proper.

Might it be so that CAD file formats are more than often not very well documented? Many image formats are well defined and open. That might be why CAD programs try to use only their native format unless exporting. That way a vendor protects themselves as well as locks in their user base.

Re:Sadly..

[serviscope_minor]

Photoshop UI has objectively better usability (much better). You should probably have a look at it before saying you don't want to learn it. (though I don't really care if you do)

I know don't want to learn it. I know the GIMP UI well enough and I don't want to take the time to learn an new UI because I can do what I want fast enough in the GIMP. Why on earth would I want to spend time learning a new UI, when the old one isn't limiting me in any measurable way.

UI is also very much in the eye of the beholder. I think the Xfig ui is brilliant compared to the inkscape one which essentially went and copied everyone else (well except CAD packages, where the Xfig UI is rather more familiar). Few people agree with me on that one.

I also prefer vi(m) to everything else.

I also prefer sloppy focus with no autoraise. Popular once, but now sadly out of fashion.

What I want is NDE layers, and I'd take that over CMYK. The dev's time is finite.

Re:Sadly..

[SumDog]

How would you know your UI isn't limiting you?

I looked at Coffeescript once a long time ago and was like, "This doesn't feel any better," and "This is a waste of time."

I looked back at it recently and gave it a fair shot. It helps there are much better tutorials and examples today. Now I'm like "OMFG why the hell would I ever write in straight Javascript again?!"

It might have helped that in the years between I did a lot more Scala, Python and Ruby...and Coffeescript really incorporates some of the amazing concepts about those languages into it.

It's like Java. Once you use Scala or Groovy for a while, you'll be like "WTF?! How did I live doing this terrible stuff in Java when all these newer JVM languages let me use all my old Java libraries with way less code, less boiler plate and cleaner syntax."

Seriously dude, if you don't try something...and by that I mean give it a fair shot, you shouldn't criticize it. You sound like "Get of my lawn."

I for one have used Photoshop since 3.0 all the way to CS6 and CC. I have also used Gimp for years. Today I only use Gimp for small quick things: cropping, resizing .. maybe adjustments (but honestly Gimp can't compare to Lightroom for that either). If I need to build anything complex, I go to Photoshop. I can't give an unbiased opinion of their UI since I've literally used it since high school. But I have used Gimp since 2002-ish, and I once did a bunch of my site graphics in it as well; so I have it a fair shake. I really feel Gimp sucks for anything really intensive and graphics related. I guarantee you, if you were in a Graphics Design job, it'd take 2x-4x longer to do something on Gimp than it would in Photoshop. Same with Inkscape and Illustrator.

Re:Sadly..

[KGIII]

Bah, you can probably get an LXDE distro to run on it. Specifically, I'd try Lubuntu 14.04 or wait for the next LTS but the 15.10 should run. I've installed 15.04 on some old, I mean old, hardware (slower than your hardware but maybe more RAM). It runs, it runs like a champ, honestly. It runs far better than I'd have expected. I don't have said hardware with me to test on but I suspect 15.10 would run just fine on it too.

Sure, you won't be loading a few dozen heavy sites in different tabs and full-screen YouTube isn't going to work well but you can probably set the quality down to around 360p and be fine in regular screen. It most likely won't like full screen but I imagine it will run just fine. Perhaps you've greater expectations of it than you're able to get? I know that I've installed on slower hardware and had it work well enough that I've sat there and browsed with hit, used a light VM loaded on it (with nothing running on the host), and have even compiled stuff on it. I've done this with more than one distro and more than one old computer - tweaking, poking, and breaking is what I do.

If I can do it then, well, you're almost certainly able to do it. Check distrowatch for more distros, use the search and find something optimized for older hardware. You may need to do some compiling but probably not much. I'm no guru or anything which is why I say that if I can do it, you can do it. I think the slowest thing I've installed a *recent* Ubuntu on (I'm thinking it was 14.04 the last time) was a 1.8 GHz, single core, 32 bit, Athlon. I think it was even Ubuntu and not Lubuntu. As I recall, it booted fairly well and ran a browser well enough so long as I kept the scripting to a dull roar. I don't remember if I played any streaming videos but I'm sure I tested with music and local video content and I'd likely remember if it didn't work properly. This was not long before I left so this was in the past six months or so.

So, yeah... If a meatstick like me can manage then I'm quite sure you can get it to run. Hell, I've had Windows 7 running on hardware that slow. (Getting stuff to run on old hardware is a bit of a hobby of mine and I used to have an MSDN subscription.) Hmm... I've even had Lubuntu running on an early Acer Aspire One netbook. I forget the model number but it was one of the oldest ones made. I never got the wifi to work but it worked plugged in well enough. It was faster than XP was on it and was a more recent version of Ubuntu or, maybe, Mint. It needed one to be patient but it wasn't that bad. :/ I've got much, much, faster hardware but it's nice to poke, play, and learn so I've been known to get a number of things running on older hardware. No choking at all, so long as I've reasonable expectations. It's not going to run like it's on a new i7 with 32 GB of RAM or the likes, it can't.

Re:Sadly..

[Dagger2]

The GIMP is a very useful, highly functional, stable and reliable piece of software.

...written by developers that think it's ok to piss off a sizeable chunk of their user base.

You're right, I think there should be a word for it.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what's the difference between export and overwrite?

Apparently they are different enough that I can't set the same key to both, but they appear to be two different names for the same thing, that just switch around randomly.

Which one is the one that does what "Save" used to do?

Re: Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Most applications can save the same formats it opens. The formats that are exported are also usually imported.
A CAD app can open and save its own format and import/export obj or ply.
GIMP opens png but exports png, opens jpg but exports jpg. It's stupid.

Re:Sadly..

[serviscope_minor]

Seriously dude, if you don't try something...and by that I mean give it a fair shot, you shouldn't criticize it

Seriously dude, read what I wrote. I'm not criticising the Photoshop UI. I'm saying the GIMP one is good enough and I don't want to learn another one, because of the time it would take.

mean give it a fair shot

But that would probably take more time than I spend using the GIMP in a year. Whih is why it seems pointless trying to learn a different one.

I guarantee you, if you were in a Graphics Design job

Yeah, but I ain't. I mostly crop photos. Ocasionally, I do something more advanced like remove annoying objects from an image or improves someone's complexion (some people turn into a bag of blood vessles under a flash). That stuff I can do. I've even convincingly shaved about 15lbs off someone too. I'm actually reasonably decent (no one spotted the photos were doctored), but I just don't do it enough to make there be a reasonable payback for learning a new UI.

And are you just talking about the UI or the features too? If the latter, then this has got way off topic.

Same with Inkscape and Illustrator.

You can pry my xfig from my cold, dead hands. Inkscape is ultimately much more capable. If I know I'm not going to need those capabilities I reach for xfig because it has one of the best UIs I've ever used. And the worst code base. I looked to see if I could update it once. Holy crap.

Anyway, unless illustrator's similar to Xfig, I won't praise its UI. I've used many programs (though not illustrator) over the years and despite it's awful features and horrendusness in other ways (FFS on screen rendering doesn't perfectly match an exported PS file) the UI is so good, I keep using it.

Re:Sadly..

[serviscope_minor]

Might it be so that CAD file formats are more than often not very well documented? Many image formats are well defined and open. That might be why CAD programs try to use only their native format unless exporting. That way a vendor protects themselves as well as locks in their user base.

I doubt it. It's almost certainly because the CAD files are vastly richer. Once you export to an STL or gerbers (CAM formats which are completely open and univerally supported) you've lost all the semanti information so editing very hard.

The CAD formats are neessarily tied to how the CAD program views the world. Eagle though uses XML so it's moderately discoverable and there exist import tools for KiCad. However, KiCad has it's OWN internal file format which nothing else supports. And etc.

but when it comes to image files, there are many image formats with identical capabilities. So claiming that a image editing/manipulation program only have one "proper" format is nonsense.

Not one of those formats (with the exception) of XCF contains enoug information that you could save from the GIMP and then load it back without losing information. And XCF isn't proprietary, it's well documented.

Finally, GIMP and Krita are working together to make a standard file format they can both use. But it's diffiult because the programs don't have the same capabilities.

Re:Sadly..

[AmiMoJo]

They are moving all the heavy graphics stuff to a library now, so that the GUI side can be detached. That's the solution you want - a GUI separate from the back end, so that you can have a choice of what suits you best without having to give up on the powerful underlying features.

Re:Sadly..

[AmiMoJo]

The same could be said of Windows, but in each there is one de-facto standard and all the others get very little love and attention.

Re:Sadly..

[Lord Bitman]

Really, in most software, "save" and "export" functionality has been merged. Because "whether or not the format is the preferred format of the program" isn't even an implementation detail. It's a developer preference. It has absolutely no place in the main tool. Having one list of formats for "save" and a different list of formats for "export" is beyond insane. Worse than old-Photoshop's "you can't save in this format, because you are using features X, Y, and Z" (instead of just launching a conversion process) - Gimp doesn't give you the option *whether or not* you're using incompatible features.

Re:Sadly..

[thegarbz]

I've never given a rat's arse about CMYK for example, because essentially everything I do winds up on screen not in print.

That's like saying I'm happy with saving everything to the cloud and I don't give a rats arse about the ability for the OS to have or manage a file system.

It is still a critical core component fundamental to the use of the program. You're right listening to all users is impossible and contradictory, however for a piece of software to have a specific purpose it should at the very least cover the basics of that purpose, such as the ability to convert and work in multiple colour spaces or the ability to work in bit-depths that don't result in degradation during editing (does GIMP have this yet? Honestly I haven't looked I got tired of the promises 10 years ago and simply abandoned all hope).

Re:Sadly..

[serviscope_minor]

It is still a critical core component fundamental to the use of the program.

Not for me. For me adjustment layers would be useful, but CMYK isn't. Given time is finite, if they listened to the print crowd they'd prioritise CMYK and if they listened to people who don't care about print they'd prioritise something else.

The problem with "listening to users" is they disagree. Like I'm disagreeing with you. You want them to work on CMYK. I'd rather they worked on things useful to me. They can't do both without additional resources.

So which of us should they listen to?

Re:Sadly..

[serviscope_minor]

Because "whether or not the format is the preferred format of the program" isn't even an implementation detail. It's a developer preference.

Except for the fundemental difference where XCF saves GIMP work accurately and not a single other file format in existence does. But apart from that it's not even an implementation detail.

Having one list of formats for "save" and a different list of formats for "export" is beyond insane.

Except that's the way professional CAD packages do it, for example. What you call "insane" other people call a sensible separation of concerns. There's a different proess for saving your work, and exporting to some other, final format which loses all the layer information.

In those other programs, you have ONE format for save (which is lossless) and one list for export (which is lossy).

Gimp doesn't give you the option *whether or not* you're using incompatible features.

It's in the export menu option instead. It's even got an "export and overwrite current" file option. And when you export it uses a conversion process.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Not one of those formats (with the exception) of XCF contains enoug information that you could save from the GIMP and then load it back without losing information. And XCF isn't proprietary, it's well documented.

Not one of those formats that GIMP handles fully or not one of those format, period?

What information can XCF save that for example TIFF or PSD cannot?

You know that data chunks in file formats are not new, right? Any program that encounters a data chunk that it does not understand should leave that data chunk for the programs that does understand them. That way you can have less capable programs making small edits while still keeping data it does not understand.

What you write about the file format of CAD programs says very little. This is the way software has been working for ages. Someone creates a program and then immediately makes their own file format because they find it more convenient than using another format. Not neccessarily out of neccessity.

That you have universal export formats that are open are often a direct consequence of this.

Given two CAD programs of equivalent capability, is there information in the file format of one CAD program that cannot be represented in the file format of another program? What would that information be? That an export format is less capable is nothing new. Export formats are often the least common denominator. Any attempts to make a "catch them all" format has failed so far.

PS. I see that more have answered your comment regarding open/save vs import/export. So it might be time to rethink your "You're flat-out wrong there" comment.

Re:Sadly..

[Junta]

I think one thing that is massively underestimated is that back in those days, there was no 'establishment' open source. In relative terms a big thing could come from anywhere because the proverbial pond was small and not well developed.

The thing is that people from that relatively small pond grew up and started becoming major sources of influence in the industry and cause the formerly small pond to suddenly get real big.

Now a lot of the same stuff happens, but no one takes note of it. The userbase of a 'uselessly niche' linux distro now is so low that we ignore it, but if you compared their userbase against the userbase in the late 90s, that niche distro may cover what would have been the vast majority.

Linux users laughed at those on Windows tied into their app ecosystems saying if it were opensource

Here is where the Linux users were wrong, but it would have been easy to not grasp that since at the time there was no evidence of insurmountable momentum in open source land. Now we have seen the reality, that closed or open source momentum is a huge thing. The power of brandnig is strong and the only times a 'fork' succeed for any remotely prominent project is when some trademark holder with absolutely zero technical skin in the game scares off the entire technical community. There's still plenty of adventures in open source, but there is now an 'establishment' open source, and the people who controlled the dialog in the 90s still largely control it and are now more set in their ways.

Re: Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Another vote for LXDE. I'm
Currently running an LXDE core desktop on n Ubuntu 15.10 base on a Gen 1 AppleTV. That thing has a 1GHz Pentium M, Nvidia 7300 Go gfx, and 256MB of RAM. Even runs well with Compton for compositing.

Re: Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Audacity, the audio editor, works the same way. It saves .aup projects and if you want a WAV, AIFF, MP3, etc., you must export it, regardless of what the original format was when the file was opened.

It makes sense. The program, by default, should save all available information. The only way to do this is to use a file format that isn't meant for content delivery (as JPEG and most other common image formats are), but rather meant to preserve the working state of image editing project in the same way that Audacity must keep all audio project data, not just the waveform for final delivery.

When you open an image in GIMP, you are creating an image editing project. When you are done, you export a version for content delivery. But you can also go back and tweak the original project because GIMP saves all necessary info to do so in a different file format by default.

Video editing applications work the same way for the most part.

Decompressed image/audio/video file --> working project --> final content delivery

It's a very standard workflow and makes sense for the type of program that GIMP is. Photoshop works the same way as soon as you make an edit that requires PS file format to save. Even if it tries to saving the same format to the same name and same place via a Control-S, it'll ask for confirmation to replace, which is what you'd expect from an Export or Save As command.

Pretty standard way to do things.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell the user? In my experience, open source doesn't give dick about the users. They want to attract developers, usually so they can tell them what to do. Innovation is discouraged.

Re:Sadly..

[CronoCloud]

Yep. I even tried out that Photoshop version under wine, it worked fairly well.

Though doing so changed a bunch of text icons in Thunar to wine bottles because for some silly reason Wine overrode the mime types and assigned text files as Adobe Workspace files for some reason. I STILL haven't got that entirely fixed.

Re:Sadly..

[Piata]

You're part of the problem then. CMYK is absolutely essential and having an image editing program that doesn't support CMYK is like having a database without data types. There is no opposition to this. All image editing software should support RGB and CMYK at a minimum.

Likewise, having a UI that is at least as functional as Photoshop's would be a huge step forward. Professional designers spend a lot of time using image editing software and having a hacked together UI like GIMP's makes the program completely irrelevant.

There absolutely is a way to listen to users. Start with the professional designers who use this type of software daily and work your way down through the different groups of people that have distinct uses for image editing software. Create UI groups and tools that cater to each segment.

As it is, I don't feel GIMP would be appealing to anyone. It's too complicated for the novice, the UI is too clunk for the pro and it lacks essential features like CMYK which means it's not even a consideration for most creative workflows. The only segment of people GIMP seems to appeal to or is targeted at is open source zealots that have their head in the sand.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux grew into the WIndows ecosystem.

Tada.

much like Windows was to DOS, PS/2 etc... and Linux is just "cooler" cause it does work better than Windows. Then again what works better than Linux? Android/OSX/iOS? And one needs not to point out that those "use" Linux... as you forget Linux uses some Windows (FAT, Networking, and anything POSIX) components...

Re: Sadly..

[KGIII]

Yup. That's kind of what I expected to hear. I've seen all sorts of hardware that was "too old" that ran Linux just fine for normal, general purpose, computing. Sure, it's not blazing fast but it's plenty fast to get things done. If they're having issues with it "choking" then they're doing something odd or not trying very hard. No, you're not going to have a bunch of tabs open and play a video in HD at the same time. But you can play a video in HD - you probably can't go much better than 720p at a local file before you get issues unless you've got a dedicated GPU with decent driver support but you can almost certainly hit that level with nary a problem.

All I can picture is a scene from a WWII documentary where a Russian soldier is beating a horse that's skinny and hauling a load that's way too heavy for it - on the ice. The horse falls and he beats it until it gets up and takes a few more steps. The clip shows up in a few different documentaries (it was in Stalingrad) and the horse is falling again as the clip cuts out. I presume it dies. If you're trying to game, watch a video, or otherwise make it do tasks it has never done well then the performance is not going to be magically improved over time. (My estimation is that it stays much the same or is marginally improved for the same size data that's being processed.)

In this case, get a lighter desktop and optimize it for the use case. Run a lightweight browser (I find Opera to be fine but Midori works well enough and has an ad blocker). Use a light email client or don't install the bloated calendering application extension in Thunderbird. Set the swap value appropriately and configure /swap properly. If possible, add RAM.

For amusement, I've maxed out the RAM on some older boxes and put an SSD in them. It's amazing how much difference that makes. I mean truly amazing at the difference it makes - it's a whole new machine. It's not required, however. The box still works, it works pretty much as fast as it ever has. If resume is well supported, you can even shut it down and power it back on quickly. They really don't take a long time to boot anyhow. If boot's a problem then, assuming one has systemd, run:

systemd-analyze critical-chain

and see where the bottleneck is. When you find it, compile it for yourself on your own hardware, and replace it - if it's required. If it's not required then don't worry about it - just remove it. Or, alternatively, deal with the extra three seconds it takes to boot.

I'm not even a guru and I can do this stuff. Hell, I'm traditionally a Windows user. I have kept Linux on a partition since the 90s but I mostly used Windows or Solaris/SunOS back in the day. Only recently did I say screw it and moved entirely to Linux. However, I've had Windows running on that same architecture in the past. I've had Windows 7 running on hardware that old - or older. It isn't speedy but it works.

Anyhow, if anything, I picture this as the afore mentioned Russian beating the dying horse. It's not going to magically run faster than it used to but it should run and run well enough to make use of it. If it doesn't then there's almost certainly a distro out there that will run - some of them will be downright speedy.

Re:Sadly..

[CronoCloud]

I absolutely hate having all the random bits strewn all over my desktop rather than neatly contained in a program window

GIMP has a single window mode now. It's a checkbox option in the "windows" menu. Works well if you're using a more modern Desktop environment instead of some silly archaic WM from 1996 the GIMP developers probably use. Single-window mode isn't enabled by default.

Re:Sadly..

[Pseudonymous Powers]

The point being that neither success nor failure in youth should be interpreted as leading to wisdom in older age.

So, what you're saying is, the past is not a good predictor of the future? I'll buy that, I guess, but... what are the alternatives?

Re:Sadly..

[Zero__Kelvin]

In Windows perhaps, but certainly not in Linux. Any claim that any of those are "defacto standards" represents a complete lack of knowledge. Period.

Re:Sadly..

[Pseudonymous Powers]

The GIMP is a very useful, highly functional, stable and reliable piece of software.

...written by developers that think it's ok to piss off a sizeable chunk of their user base. You're right, I think there should be a word for it.

I think the word for that is "open source".

Re:Sadly..

[bucky0]

Keeping up w/gimp a little bit, I know they were working on library-izing the codebase a few years ago. Did that ever get done?

Re:Sadly..

[Pseudonymous Powers]

CMYK is absolutely essential [...] All image editing software should support RGB and CMYK at a minimum.

I've never used GIMP for anything print-related, but I understand that, among those who do, there are frequent complaints about its CMYK support.

I'm genuinely curious. Can someone summarize the major problems here? Speaking out of my near-complete ignorance, isn't it just an alternate color space? On the one hand, how much time could an alternate color space take to implement? And, on the other hand, what makes it so inconvenient to do all the editing work in RGB and convert it to CMYK as the last step?

Re:Sadly..

[Zero__Kelvin]

"I think a good example of something becoming the standard would be systemd."

systemd isn't an application, it is part of the OS. It's a Red Herring, and anyone who brings up systemd as an example is about as far off base as possible. Nothing you said is true. In every category there are multiple maintained and viable choices. Period. There is simply no greater wealth of software available on any non-FOSS platform. Yes there are areas that are lacking, but it excels in all the other areas.

Re:Sadly..

[serviscope_minor]

tiff, PSD
First, the psd specs are under a proprietary license.

Second, sure, ok, you could have the composited layer as the first page in a tiff, and then the entire xcf stored in a data chunk. Then, simple programs could view the image, and pretend to edit, though of course that works cause the image to become out of sync with the stored gimp related data. And still nothing else world be able to read the rest of the tiff successfully.

So, that would be basically pretty useless, and fun things would happen when people made minor edits outside the gimp and reloaded is. But it's easy to script. Export xcf, export tiff, then mush the xcf into the tiff. Easy top do, so if you think it's useful, knock yourself out.

Given two CAD programs of equivalent capability

No two cad packages have equivalent functionality. They're similar in some ways, but never identical.

There is no universal export format that would sensibly go from say the parametric brep style of pro engineer with its ability to stimulate whole mechanisms to the programmatic style of BRL cad with its unmatched ballistics stimulating system.

PS. I see that more have answered your comment regarding open/save vs import/export. So it might be time to rethink your "You're flat-out wrong there" comment.

Yes, my observation of facts is outweighed by ignorant comments from the peanut gallery. It is a provable fact that other programs out there operate in the same way as the gimp in this regard.

Re:Sadly..

[bucky0]

Isn't that the 80/20 rule? I know I'm guilty of doing the "exciting" stuff on little libraries, then when it comes to the bits like packaging/documentation/etc.., putting it off to "later". It's just not as fun to do those little maintenance stuff as it is the neat parts

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think there's anything incompatible about allowing different options and configurations in a problem that's supposed to be a the swiss army knife of image editing. Photoshop UI? Just provide a way for the user to select their preferred workspace layout. Window manager trouble? A simple checkbox with a bunch of logic behind it would suffice. CMYK is a hard one, but again, if there were motivated developers in the community, this would have already happened.

Re: Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference lies in the printer, and its RIP software. Consider that you can use the K channel to print pure black, or you can use some combination of CMY to print an approximation of black. If you have Photoshop handy, go into the color picker and set 0,0,0 in RGB, and you'll see something like 75,68,67,90 in CMYK, known as rich black in printer speak. It uses a ton more ink than necessary unless your RIP has intelligent ink levels, and the color of that color usually has a weird brownish rainbow sheen when viewed from an angle.

Colorspace conversion is notoriously poor at making that decision for things like logos, for example, where you're trying to match a Pantone color or some such, but generally good for things like photos, which are more subjective anyway.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.

Source: The GPL.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't hit save, I hit Export. No problem. Now I use OSX Photos for conversion, then finish up from there in GIMP.

Re: Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Audacity, the audio editor, works the same way. It saves .aup projects and if you want a WAV, AIFF, MP3, etc., you must export it, regardless of what the original format was when the file was opened.

So the real issue is that "open" really means "import" for anything non-native?

Re:Sadly..

[arielCo]

Overwrite is akin to Save but only appears when you've loaded a non-GIMP format. Export is always available and is akin to Save As.... They don't switch around - the only variation is that Overwrite is greyed out for being redundant with Save if you didn't start with a non-XCF file.

It could be simplified, but it's easy to see that Overwrite foo.png won't preserve everything you're looking at (e.g. layers and objects) like Save does; it's more like re-exporting to the raster format it came from.

Then again, there are much bigger faults in GIMP than menu item naming.

Re:Sadly..

[myrdos2]

One app for graphics, gimp. . One app for a gui, gnome. One app for an ide Eclipse, etc

I'm a Linux user and I've never felt pressure to use any of those things. It's Kolourpaint, KDE or XFCE, and Kate or CodeBlocks for me. Though I'm going to try Qt's IDE, I hear it's a good one.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also the mental effort required. I have a friend who literally does everything in print and CMYK. You ask him what read is and he will spit out an answer in that color space and actually has to think a minute to go to RGB. But it also affects everything, there is filter mathematics and the fact that printers use DPI. You have to also keep that in mind, and that is easier to do with CMYK because a gigantic layer of abstraction for how much physical ink is used is removed. Also, many colors used in printing are defined in CMYK, so if you translate them to RGB and back again, you may get a way different answer and it doesn't match, especially if a lot of black is involved.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and if you design for print, and really do need CMYK, GIMP is useless. Different users -- gasp! -- really do have different needs.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. The save format is such a pain in the ****. It's one of the things that creates a lot of friction and annoyance compared to other packages.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you aren't an artists, so what YOU want doesn't count for much. You, by your own admission, don't know what a good image editor should be like so your opinion is invalid.

Re:Sadly..

[chipschap]

So how do you tell whether you've changed the image since exporting?

Ummm, maybe you use your, you know, brain to tell you if you've done more work on the image?

Re:Sadly..

[thegarbz]

What is important to people comes into play once the fundamental capability of software is taken care of.

Note how I didn't say CMYK. I said work in multiple colour spaces. You simply wanting a better cruise control in your car and me wanting a better radio shouldn't get in the way of them ensuring that the car has a reverse gear. Let me quote their website: "High Quality Photo Manipulation - GIMP provides the tools needed for high quality image manipulation. From retouching to restoring to creative composites, the only limit is your imagination."

What you and I want the program to do is irrelevant when the fundamentals are missing. Just like a car that can only drive forward. It may not affect you if you live in a circular road, but it is a fundamental ability that a car needs to have. They are aiming for something that they haven't got and yet are advertising it as if it has already been achieved. All the while, I'm not even sure if they know how much they get mocked in the circles they claim to be their target audience.

I fully agree with you, you can't please everyone. But at the same token if you can't please a large portion of your target audience you're doomed. There should be a word for that. Maybe Mozillaring. For the record I couldn't care less about CMYK, I don't print. But if the creator wants to ignore it then it shouldn't be advertised as the premier solution, especially given the manual's talk on how to create accurate prints through colour management.

Re:Sadly..

[tepples]

If human memory is as infallible as you claim, then why does any program warn the user of unsaved changes?

Re:Sadly..

[budgenator]

Where GIMP's UI starts to shine is when your on multiple monitor setups, you put the toolboxes and layers on your smaller 32 inch monitor and the image your editing can almost full-screen on your big, calibrated monster-sized 60 inch 4K monitor. Photoshop has everything in one window so doing split-screens doesn't make any sense. One thing I have noticed is Photoshoppers say that photoshop is faster, and it is for photoshop users, but GIMP users tend to learn their keyboard shortcuts so they are almost as fast in photoshop as the photshoppers and blow away photshopers in GIMP.

Re:Sadly..

[exomondo]

Wait, Free is supposed to mean getting users to pay? I guess I'm old fashioned because to me "free" equals "not paid for".

Yes I think that has been a huge problem for free software, the confusion over the meaning of the word "free" (particularly when you have things like "freeware" in the mix). Because, by it's nature, Free Software can be freely shared it is usually free of cost to obtain which further confuses people. Instead of always having to explain it as "free as in freedom" they should have just called it Freedom Software.

Re:Sadly..

[exomondo]

So fork the GIMP repo and patch it then just merge from the mainline on the major releases. Seriously what is the point of open source if all people are going to do is whine about how the developers aren't doing exactly what they want?

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the data will be lost if not saved. If you haven't exported it after making changes then clearly parts of the image that are supposed to be there will be missing in the version that you have exported. The save warns you that you may be losing changes so that if you forgot to re-export then when you look at your exported image and your brain realizes that it isn't right you can go back and re-export. Additionally the "save changes" warning immediately indicates that you should probably also export your image (if that wasn't the last action you did before saving).

Re:Sadly..

[budgenator]

Since there is a lot a bashing the monkey-boy's Gnome in this thread it would be a shame to forget Miguel's first love Midnight Commander in any VI/VIM vs Emacs flame-war!
It always seemed strange that de Icaza started Gnome because Qt was proprietary, but cloned so much proprietary software.

Re:Sadly..

[exomondo]

It also brings GIMP in line with a lot of professional software.

I totally agree with you. I just find it bizarre that for all the pontificating about the greatness of Free Software these discussions are actually taking place and on a site like slashdot no less. It really shows that FOSS has a long way to go before people get it, even in the geek community.

Re:Sadly..

[budgenator]

It doesn't if you click the overwrite option which save over the same file you opened; if you open a lossy format, edited and overwrote in a lossy format, sooner or later your going to have a mess you can't undo. Saving in the lossless proprietary format means you don't lose your work everytime your 3 year old tries to help you while you're keeping the dog from eating the cat.

Re:Sadly..

[digitect]

Except that's the way professional CAD packages do it, for example.

You keep mentioning CAD software, but there is no similarity between CAD formats and typical raster formats. JPG, PNG, TIF, and GIF are industry standards that GIMP should be able to open and save. CAD formats have vectors and a lot of other information that is particular to each software's implementation since there aren't open, widely-used vector file formats.

There are AutoCAD-compatible clones that open and close that proprietary format without question. LibreOffice also opens and closes non-native formats without complaint if you turn off a checkbox preference. If you stretch the analogy enough, we can take this illustration to even further ridiculous extremes. But the fact remains, GIMP is raster software that can be used to edit lots of standard format raster files that shouldn't require exports for files opened.

If you honestly believe Export is the correct terminology and UX, then you should also be advocating GIMP's "Open" menu change to "Import." That would correctly match what you are claiming on the save side. Open would then be reserved for XCF files but everything else should have to be imported. GIMP should treat the whole business like RAW and refuse to ever save any changes over the originally opened file unless it is an XCF.

At least that would be consistent. Insane, but at least consistent.

The current GIMP behavior appears to be structured to sell the software's (developer's) capabilities over users that are too stupid to think for themselves. Unfortunately, everybody sees this except for the developers.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the fundemental difference where XCF saves GIMP work accurately and not a single other file format in existence does.

But it doesn't do that - it doesn't save your undo history (at least, I haven't ever seen an option to do that.) Nor does it save the settings of tools, selected colors, filters, etc. That, to me, would be what it means to "save your GIMP work", and the only way I know of to do that is to leave the program open and never log out.

Seen from that perspective, XCF is still a lossy format; and in fact, if the image is only one layer, XCF is no more or less lossy than PNG.

Re:Sadly..

[tepples]

The save warns you that you may be losing changes so that if you forgot to re-export then when you look at your exported image and your brain realizes that it isn't right you can go back and re-export.

The save warns me that I might be losing changes even if I just exported. Or are you recommending keeping an XCF copy of every non-XCF image that I have ever edited using GIMP?

Re:Sadly..

[makapuf]

You mean there are no ideas of interesting things to do with GIMP ?
I have PLENTY of ideas (but not having time to contribute them I prefer to STFU) :

- merge of scale, rotate and move, even perpective layer tools to on-canvas handles (even non destructive composition)
- non-destructive layer effects (GEGL for real)
- better font handling UI for text
- non destructive cage deformation
- better background removal options
- palette based dithering
- pixel art editing tools (tiling edition : modify all similar grid tiles, tileset edition)
- better animation support (by example allow zooming in animation replay for spriting, ghost frames)
- better palette sorting
- better dithering for non-regular palettes
- 16bit color or CYMK ? don't need them, but eh. ...

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why were you using RTF in the first place? A poorly specified half arsed mangling of text and binary which is interpreted differently by every single word processor out there - it's worse even than .doc. If you want interoperability, use ODF or docx.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

CTRL+SHIFT+E

Re:Sadly..

[exomondo]

You mean there are no ideas of interesting things to do with GIMP ?

No I mean that the things that need doing are not exciting to anybody with the time to volunteer to do them. Sure I'd knock some of those off that list if somebody paid me to do it but I'm not interested in spending my free time doing it, there's more fun things to do in the world of software than that. Seems most others share that view too.

Once the volunteers get bored the projects stagnate because the model of users paying devs to add features for them doesn't really work. The case where it does work is when those users are large corporations that can afford to employ and manage contract developers or their own software development department, but of course proprietary software vendors listen to those customers and often act on their requests as a high priority so the customer doesn't have to worry about software development.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

The save warns me that I might be losing changes even if I just exported.

Yes that is obviously what it does. If you just exported an image to JPEG with features that are unsupported by JPEG then those features will not be saved in the JPEG image and will be lost if you do not save to the application's native format.

Or are you recommending keeping an XCF copy of every non-XCF image that I have ever edited using GIMP?

I think you can make that decision on your own, you dont need me to hold your hand.

Re:Sadly..

[tepples]

. If you just exported an image to JPEG with features that are unsupported by JPEG then those features will not be saved in the JPEG image and will be lost if you do not save to the application's native format.

Then it should at least tell me what features unsupported by JPEG (or, more commonly in my case, by PNG) have been changed since I opened the image.

Re:Sadly..

[Blaskowicz]

It used to be known as the "interoperable" format.
Also carries a connotation of being lightweight (in a sense), simple or braindead. I thought it was unchanged since the early 90s and apparently that's not true.

Re:Sadly..

[terjeber]

Why on earth would I want to spend time learning a new UI, when the old one isn't limiting me in any measurable way.

How do you know. You admit to never having seen the alternative? The comment is essentially moronic based on ignorance. Are you religious perhaps? For all you know the UI, and the functionality could cut your time by 90%.

I also prefer vi(m) to everything else.

For simple text editing, vi(m) is fantastic. If you are a developer and use vi(m) as your main editor, you are a retarded moron with a brain the size and shape of a raisin.

Re:Sadly..

[terjeber]

Photoshop has everything in one window so doing split-screens doesn't make any sense

Ignorance is bliss I guess. Any part of the Photoshop UI can be un-docked and moved to another monitor.

Re:Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you honestly believe Export is the correct terminology and UX, then you should also be advocating GIMP's "Open" menu change to "Import." That would correctly match what you are claiming on the save side.

That would actually make sense, because right now the semantics are all screwed up.

I can "open" a PNG in GIMP, and add a layer. It won't let me "save" the PNG because layers are not allowed, so I either have to convert it to native or export it.

In the meantime, the image window says I have a "PNG" open, yet it has layers. How is that possible? Is it still a PNG? If it hasn't been saved yet, I can't rely on the "file type" to tell me.

What exactly am I looking at? If it's not a PNG anymore, why does the window title say it is? It's in limbo.

At the age

[Anonymous Coward]

one is expected to be a gimp, but to always have been a gimp is just depressing.

Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

As anyone stepped up to create a fork yet?

Unless the code base is truly awful, I wouldn't mind maintaining some user interface sanity patches if there's interest.
I've certainly had enough of XCF being the default saving format when 95% of the time I'm just doing a quick edit on a image.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

As anyone stepped up to create a fork yet?

Unless the code base is truly awful, I wouldn't mind maintaining some user interface sanity patches if there's interest. I've certainly had enough of XCF being the default saving format when 95% of the time I'm just doing a quick edit on a image.

Yeah, problem is there's just too many people that like it, so even though it is possible to fork very few distros would switch to it.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

If the distros could switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice without users running into trouble, it's surely not impossible to fork a much smaller project like GIMP.

It wouldn't be the first time a fork starts by tracking upstream an ends up the more active project.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

As anyone stepped up to create a fork yet?...

Nope

...Unless the code base is truly awful,

Bingo!
As it (Gimp 2.8.x) was bothering me, and I'd been at a bit of a imparse(sic) with another project, I thought, fsck it, so had a good look at the 2.8.x codebase over a couple of months with a view to doing some serious tinkering with it..the words fuck that for a game came to my lips on more than several occasions, life is too short.

Sorry to say, I've switched to using CS2 and Photopaint(yes, seriously, Photopaint, it's less of a drain on system resources on the same machine than Gimp) on a windows box for the more serious graphics work I need to do, and I've still got Gimp 2.6.x installed on the Linux boxen.

But hey, I'm just an AC who can remember hacking and compiling the original release to get it to work on a Sun 3/60..so maybe I should get back to dodging a coffin..

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah that's what I feared.
I think I'll just take your word for it and go do something more productive with what time I still have.

Re:Fork

[kmh79]

The codebase *is* quite awful. I had a brief look at it a few years ago, and I was not impressed. It's written in plain C, and emulates concepts such as OO or generics via very hacky means, since they're not built into the language. Heck, the whole program should have been re-written in modern-style C++ 10 years ago. Assuming constant maintenance and modernization we would have a nice, readable and maintainable C++11 codebase now, but no... Just because the current maintainers seem to be stuck in the proverbial middle ages.

Re:Fork

[exomondo]

Yeah, problem is there's just too many people that like it, so even though it is possible to fork very few distros would switch to it.

Why does an image editing program have to be bundled with the operating system? If the fork is better then people will use it, if people aren't even willing to install it separately then obviously it isn't very good.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think that a 2d image editor should be a fairly simple job, something handled mostly by standard libraries now. I mean compared to somehting like Blender it is not rocket science, but more an excercise in UI (which needs overhaul anyway) and optimization (which needs new fresh concepts also).

But perhaps Gimp would better be replaced by something like Darktable where photo editing is concerned - maybe Darktable could use some new features or optimizations though. For creative painting, I have no idea.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

C++ is not an object oriented language, if object orientation means that subclasses can be substituted at will for their parent classes, or dynamic message passing, instead of just 'has things called classes'.

The type of objects defined in the gobject library, which was developed for Gimp and GTK, are very similar to that used in Java, Python, and most new languages today.

The use case for C++ is computer science research, where being able to turn off language features is important, and videogames, where knowing exactly what is happening in the program at all times to push pixels as quickly as possible is important. Those are not small fields, but they do not encompass desktop applications.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

For creative painting, Krita looks refreshingly good. In fact, I'd be very happy if they added photo manipulation tools to Krita. It would replace GIMP in a matter of months.

Re: Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

Blender has a 2D compositor that offers a lot of the functionality of an image editor via a visual node based editor. It's miles ahead of GIMP.

Re:Fork

[fnj]

Heck, the whole program should have been re-written in modern-style C++ 10 years ago.

There WAS no modern C++ until 2011. If you don't believe that, just consider that the (only) official smart pointer was the hideous monstrosity of std::auto_ptr until std::shared_ptr, std::unique_ptr, and std::weak_ptr supplanted it in c++11. OK, you could have used boost:shared_ptr 10 years ago, which is what I did, but you can't assume that all projects would be allowed to do so.

Re:Fork

[louden obscure]

I've certainly had enough of XCF being the default saving format when 95% of the time I'm just doing a quick edit on a image.

overwrite the image or export if you don't want to save as an .xcf...

Re:Fork

[Kjella]

You'd think that a 2d image editor should be a fairly simple job, something handled mostly by standard libraries now. I mean compared to somehting like Blender it is not rocket science, but more an excercise in UI (which needs overhaul anyway) and optimization (which needs new fresh concepts also).

Depends, there are some really simple tools to do simple things. But there's a near infinite way of doing tools and filters with parameters, take for example a noise reduction or edge-detecting sharpening filter or airbrush tool. Of course in theory they all boil down to setting one and one pixel, but there'll always be room for workflow improvements to get you from A to B in the easiest, quickest way yielding the best results.

Re:Fork

[ChrisMaple]

There's a lot going on in gimp. Multiple plugin mechanisms, hundreds on add-ons. There's layers, selections, paths, undo, channels, and even some video functions. A complete rewrite without losing functionality would be a major unpaid commitment for one person.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think a 2D file format would be simple too. But look at file formats like TIFF, JPG, RAW and PNG. Entire books have been written dedicated to each of those. Having to convert between image formats is a big headache for any creative company. That's where toolkits like ImageMagick comes in. Assuming you did manage to create your universal file format representation (everything from 256 color palettes to HDR in floating point precision), then you have to handle multiple layers, selected regions in each layer (elliptical, single freehand loop, selected regions) as well as a dozens of different types of paint brush and pixel blending modes. Then you need a scripting language that can record commands off the application, save them to file and run them as batch commands on sets of images.
More complex image operations include signal-processing with the FFT that convert the image into a frequency graph, perform masking and convert back to a regular image (for each channel). On top of that are optimizations using parallel processing (SSE/AVX, compute shaders, TBB, CUDA). That in itself is a current area of research.

Re:Fork

[Zero__Kelvin]

"There WAS no modern C++ until 2011."

Did you stop to think at all before you wrote that? Seriously, read that again to yourself out loud. Can you actually say it with a straight face?

Re:Fork

[nnull]

That's because LibreOffice sucks as much as OpenOffice. No big deal to switch between either of them. LibreOffice just had the upper hand because it was removing all the java crap in it.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the problem is that it now defaults to that file format even if you don't need any of its features.

GIMP went from "GNU program for manipulating images" to "program for manipulating GNU images."

Re:Fork

[tepples]

I understood exactly what was meant: C++98 could not compete as a modern language with a modern standard library, but C++11 could.

Re:Fork

[mrchaotica]

You'd think that a 2d image editor should be a fairly simple job, something handled mostly by standard libraries now.

Isn't that what they're trying to do? Last I heard, they were working on implementing a clean library, GEGL and then they were going to rewrite GIMP to use it.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

There's darktable & digikam for photos.

Re:Fork

[Tough Love]

No. LibreOffice had the upper hand because it had nearly all the devs, who had gotten good and tired of Sun/Oracle. Losing the bogus Java tie was just a nice bonus.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does an image editing program have to be bundled with the operating system?

See, if you run out of memory you can swap to an image file.

Re:Fork

[Zero__Kelvin]

More nonsense. Ah, what can I expect considering the source?

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

What does "modern language" mean?

Re:Fork

[KGIII]

I frequently find myself in agreement with you and seldom agree with the person you're responding to. This leaves me in a confused state. That means, as usual, I'm probably missing something. Would you be so kind as to explain to me what it is that you're choosing to use for your definition of "modern language" and what you think was lacking in C++98 (not specifically, but conceptually) that makes your argument hold water?

I should also be *very* clear. At one point in time, I was moderately familiar with C++ but this would have been C++98. The last time that I'd have touched any code would have been not much after that and most of my fluency was in C and not C++. I'd never say that I was fluent with C++, even when it was used frequently. I'll also be quite specific and say that I should not be confused for a programmer.

I have programmed, in fact I've written countless lines - usually when they could have been condensed to a few lines. It was a necessity. My code base was, in time, rewritten in its entirety and I did learn a lot from the professionals by being smart enough to know that I paid them because they were good. They did things that I could not do. They did things in time-frames that were not achievable by me. They did things like go to college and get degrees specifically in computer science. Some of them were actual real-life engineers, not just "software engineers."

I say that to say, explain it like I'm five - if you don't mind. :-/ For I am not that skilled in the art of programming and can generally grok things conceptually more so than specifically but I have a search engine handy if need be.

Re:Fork

[serviscope_minor]

Heck, the whole program should have been re-written in modern-style C++ 10 years ago.

As GCC is showing, porting to C++ rather than a complete rewrite is possible (as was always the goal of C++). First step was to get it all so it compiled cleanly in C++. Then, the next step was to develop some good guidelines and switch off support for C.

The guidelines include things like never throw (because the current code isn't exception safe), but always write exception safe code (because exceptions will be switched on later). Of course GCC has some rather peculiar requirements about being able to compile itself via old versions which restricts which features they can use a bit, due to wanting to be able to bootstrap from older compilers.

Nonetheless, it's a very large, very complex and very critical project but shows the port to C+ can be done, and done slowly and gently without disruption.

Of course it will never happen in the GIMP because too many people have frankly very silly opinions about both C and C++.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

There WAS no modern C++ until 2011.

Before C++11 modern C++ meant writing RAII compatible code, using the standard library and basically acknowledging that C++98 was finally implemented ( excluding a few edge cases or impossible features ) by most compilers and not just a crippled C clone with classes. It took years before most compilers and standard libraries actually followed the standard, side effects include the Google Style for C++ which even for a short timespan after C++11 demonised every concept, pattern and class provided by the "standard" library and instead upheld Java style OO with deep inheritance hierarchies and C style manual new followed by init() / destroy() followed by delete as the high of maintainable code ( the real reason not mentioned by the style guide was afaik Google developers using grep to navigate the code base - making explicit calls necessary ).

but you can't assume that all projects would be allowed to do so.

std::tr1::shared_ptr predates std::shared_ptr by almost a decade. Also outside of projects bound to truly outlandish ( or outdated ) systems there is little reason to forbid boost for a desktop application.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

Distros shouldn't care about image editors in the first place. Or maybe, just maybe about some very basic "open" "resize" "close" thing.

Re: Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if the distro compiles the software themselves, the developers don't have to build a gazillion packages.

Re:Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly the reason it hasn't been forked. It is absolute trash.
Nobody wants to touch it. It is tainted by stupidity and ass-backwardsness just to be a special snowflake.
There is honestly less effort in writing your own project 100% from scratch, using zero libraries to help you.

I seriously wonder and worry for the mental state of people that worked on that heap of trash.
Some of the decisions made in how it works, how it deals with files, how it deals with layers, UI management, CONSISTENCY and everything else under the sun.
It's like they killed everyone that mentioned "let's be consistent".

There is doing things better than the competition, then changing things for the sake of changing things.
To use a car metaphor, GIMP is like that car Homer designed.

Re: Fork

[exomondo]

If you build for rpm, dpkg and slackpkg you'll have all the major ones covered....or just use 0install to target everything.

The Gimp helps smack my bum.

[Anonymous Coward]

I get my bum smacked every day thanks to the Gimp's built in bum smacking machine.

GIMP is for cows.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOO! MOOOO! Moo cows MOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU ALPHA CHANNEL COWS!!

Re:GIMP is for cows.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.cowspiracy.com/

A Few Years Ago....

[mlauzon]

I remember reading a few years ago, possibly here on /., that GIMP was going to be rewritten to get rid of all the "spaghetti code", whatever happened with that?

Re:A Few Years Ago....

[Anonymous Coward]

Still on going... it's a rather big engine rewrite, last that I checked gegl was going through the final stages. I would assume that it's in use by this point, and most fixing to it would be for edge-cases.

Re:A Few Years Ago....

[Anonymous Coward]

Rewriting doesn't help if you don't know how it will get red of said spaghetti code.
Most of the time it is just a matter of "someone else wrote it so it smells bad to me" and rewriting only leads to the rewriter recreating the same ugly workarounds but with an understanding of why they are there.

Re:A Few Years Ago....

[Greyfox]

It was going to coincide with a renaming of the product to something a bit more professional, as suggested by the fans of the application. Sadly, GNU Goatfucker never got off the ground.

Re:A Few Years Ago....

[Anonymous Coward]

GEGL is mostly complete. The work that's happening today is to port all of Gimp to make use of GEGL which is the goal of Gimp 2.10. Gimp 2.10 has been in development for a few years now should it should be due for release within a couple of years.

Re:A Few Years Ago....

[Rufty]

At a guess, another layer of spaghetti code got added.

Re: A Few Years Ago....

[Anonymous Coward]

They would have been better making a new application if it's taking so long to rewrite.

Re:A Few Years Ago....

[geantvert]

I have a few moderation points to use but I cannot figure out if I should classified your post as Troll, Insightful or Funny.

The thing that pisses me off with gimp is not the UI or saving by default to XCF. I am interested by raw image processing and I would be very happy to use and to contribute to the new 16bit depth features. Unfortunately, the GIMP devs are actively doing everything they can to prevent peoples from trying the current development version. No major release for more than 3 years and no available development release for testing? Be serious guys! This is insane.

   

Gimp is actually useful now

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we have up to 64-bit FP per pixel precision :)

For those that do not see the need, it is necessary for FITs data, this is used for astro imaging.

Took them long enough to get 16-bit for TIFF's.

These are all in 2.9.x and looks great on Linux.

Is there a decent build for 2.9 for WIndows I can download? I cannot find one anywhere.

Re:Gimp is actually useful now

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.partha.com/

Re:Gimp is actually useful now

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the power of GEGL. Gimp 2.10 is the next version of Gimp and a huge milestone for the project. The team is working to port all of Gimp's drawing operations to make use of GEGL and when it's finally complete, all the nice features that people have demanded over the years will not be difficult to deliver using GEGL.

Re:Gimp is actually useful now

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried them, terrible build, no where near like the Linux nightly build.

Icons missins, dark theme, all rubbish unusable, I have VM with Linux and the nightly Gimp works great.

Still waiting for

[Anonymous Coward]

>8 BPP support, non destructive editing, and the name to change...

Re:Still waiting for

[Anonymous Coward]

Install 2.9.1 it is very usable (except on Windows because nobody has made a decent build of it there.).

Re:Still waiting for

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's not usable on Windows, it's not usable for 95% of the population.

Re:Still waiting for

[Anonymous Coward]

It is, but whoever built the one I found on the internet is terrible at building Gimp.

Half the icons are missing lol, the one on the nightly branch is better for apt.

Re:Still waiting for

[Anonymous Coward]

They changed the name in 2.9.1?

Re:Still waiting for

[mark-t]

No, but the other issues mentioned were genuine functional differences. What it happens to be called should not matter anywhere nearly as much as whether it will actually help someone with the stuff they really need to get done, and if it actually could do the latter, I might imagine that the only reason one would still complain about the former is if they personally didn't actually have any real use for the software in the first place.

Re:Still waiting for

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but the other issues mentioned were genuine functional differences. What it happens to be called should not matter anywhere nearly as much as whether it will actually help someone with the stuff they really need to get done, and if it actually could do the latter, I might imagine that the only reason one would still complain about the former is if they personally didn't actually have any real use for the software in the first place.

I think you missed my point. I listed the three things that prevented me from adopting GIMP. I am glad that the first two are in the unstable branch, and maybe we will get a stable release with them sometime in the next few years.

But the name is a problem. Maybe not for you, but it is for me and many other people.

Re:Still waiting for

[Anonymous Coward]

The Windows babbies have to wait for this development project to do their work. Everybody else can easily get a bleeding edge copy of the software.

Re:Still waiting for

[mark-t]

And you missed mine, which is that once gimp meets a person's functional requirements, the name is unlikely to matter to many more people. I would suggest that it only significantly gets associated with the negative meaning of a homophone for its name by people because it isn't adequate in the first place.

Plus, you can call it whatever the heck you want.... it's open source you could even make a fork.... if the fork is just a name change, then such a fork would be quite trivial, if your fork isn't widely adopted by the community, then wouldn't that suggest that the name isn't as big a deal as you are implying?

Gimp needs Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimp needs Linux to give them the middle finger and write lots of arguing emails and forum threads to really show them how it's done.

Re:Gimp needs Linux

[interval1066]

Gimp is ok (I guess), it just needs some one to step up and write a better (which wouldn't be hard) UI for it, Gimp has The Worst UI of any gfx manip app I've ever used, and I've used plenty. Sure, when it comes to doing some quick pic editing I use it, but with reluctance. I very much wish there was a native port of something like LView Pro for Linux. I find the UI so intuitive I can Just Use it, Not so gimp. I've read reviews of gimp that say that Gimp isn't meant for image processing along those lines. Great, so what is it for? Again, I'm not saying Gimp isn't powerful, I can see that under the covers the gimp has some serous gfx horsepower there, I know some amazing things can be done with it. But when I have to spend 5 hours just to figure out how to coax one feature out of the thing, its simply not very useful. If it had a UI like LView Pro, I'd be using it every day.

Re:Gimp needs Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you haven't leveled any specific criticisms, I can only assume you WROTE LView Pro. Also, I can't bring myself to install software from a website that looks that tacky.

Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get some perspective.

From the perspective of using Photoshop; GIMP sucks the llama's ass.

Oh, by the way, it also suffers from a shrinking userbase, shrinking developer base and developers with a God complex.

Hey! You're right, perspective changes... nothing at all.

Re:Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, dipshit, the point was to try a perspective OTHER than from using photoshop.

Re:Get some perspective.

[canuck_spud]

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.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

Photoshop is for professionals who need to do real work. GIMP is a toy for little kids and immature adults who are fooling themselves. That's all there is to it.

Re:Get some perspective.

[Applehu Akbar]

And the open-source world has nothing that even approaches Lightroom.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Zontar The Mindless]

Been using GIMP to do real, "professional" work for about 15 years.

But I'm not some AC with a propensity for self-serving generalisations, so what do I know.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Frosty Piss]

I notice you put "professional" in quotes.

That says a lot, really.

GIMP is not even a shadow of PhotoShop, both in functionality and usability, and never will be.

Re:Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the open-source world has nothing that even approaches Lightroom.

I dunno, the latest versions of RawTherapee seem to work... OK. They're not short of functionality, although there are some elements of the UI that could be improved and the speed of operations is kinda slow compared to Lightroom. I hear darktable is also reasonable, although I wouldn't know because it doesn't run under Windows and I don't want to confine myself to Linux-only software (I consider it as bad as Windows-only software).

The options exists, I guess it just depends on what one can tolerate. It'd be a shame for these developers to be putting in all that work and effort to just be dismissed by others so casually.

Re: Get some perspective.

[tepples]

I notice you put "professional" in quotes.

That says a lot, really.

I'm not entirely sure what you meant to imply by that, but I have been using GIMP to do pixel art work in projects for which I was paid.

• The graphics for the menu in the anthology STREEMERZ: Action 53 Function 16 Volume One, as well as its "Concentration Room", "Thwaite", and "ZapPing" activities, were made in GIMP.
• The graphics for the menu in the anthology Double Action 53: Volume 2, as well as its "RHDE" and "robotfindskitten" activities, were made in GIMP.
• I did most of the programming and the art conversion pipeline for Haunted: Halloween '85. The lead artist presumably made the game's graphics in Photoshop, but my retouching to prepare them for insertion into the game was all in GIMP.

What's a "professional" again?

Re: Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeesh. If this is the quality of the commentary from the Photoshop fandom, then I'll gladly keep using other software just to not be associated with the like.

Anecdotally, the last time I tried to come back to Photoshop was a month ago, and it's interface is such a nightmare of inconsistency and bizarre ideas that even though I used to use it regularly, I can barely use it anymore. GIMP feels downright logical by comparison. I can live without a few features, but I can't live with such a user-hostile UI.

Re: Get some perspective.

[dbIII]

Since it was about web graphics from day one and not pre-press stuff it's like comparing a text editor to a desktop publishing application - different tools for different jobs.
If a co-worker wants to crop baby photos gimp is the tool. If a co-worker wants to take screenshots and put them in reports gimp is the tool. If an expensive per hour graphic artist wants to do something that it took them ages to learn then something like photoshop is the tool. For those of us who didn't go to art school gimp is more than enough.

As for your last comment - gimp started with some more functionality than photoshop at the time, such as the "undo" function. I started a flamewar on a newsgroup by accident by asking where "undo" was in photoshop when I was attempting to use it on a machine with a licenced copy. Apparently "no true professional will ever need undo because they will know to save before every major step". Of course the feature was added to photoshop a few years later no matter what the fanboys thought.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to crop pictures, take screenshots and the like, Faststone or pretty much any picture browser will do it and more faster and better than GIMP. GIMP is not a tool. It actually impairs your ability to work smoothly. It never really had any purpose existing in the first place. It was just the half-assed project of a bunch of losers who wanted to "show it to Adobe" and miserably failed.

Re: Get some perspective.

[dbIII]

GIMP is not a tool

You sir however do indeed seem to be a tool. A complete and utter one.
What is it with these people?

Re: Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

I did this in the GIMP. There must be something wrong with people as clearly the GIMP is capable of a great many things.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or your co-worker could just check iTunes or the Window store and install the free version of Photoshop without touching that steaming pile of crap with the offensive acronym.

Re:Get some perspective.

[graphius]

Digicam is a much better Digital Asset Manager (DAM) than Lightroom, however Lightroom does some half arsed raw developing for people who don't know how to use Photoshop.
I say this as a semi-professional photographer/artist who uses Photoshop and Lightroom almost daily.
I tried to use GIMP, but things like actions, and some advanced editing techniques were just too hard or less efficient in GIMP.

Re: Get some perspective.

[serviscope_minor]

I notice you put "professional" in quotes.

That says a lot, really.

GIMP is not even a shadow of PhotoShop, both in functionality and usability, and never will be.

Oh FFS. One of the "my definition of professional is the real professional" hardliners. Professional is stuff done for money, which usually means stuff done for businesses/public sector by businesses. Just take a look around you walking. Not everything is an iPhone advert in a high end magazine. Then again, half the iPhone ads seem to be photos designed to make me think the taker was on his "gap yah" (go watch that video). Anyway, things I see in on my way into work:

Large sign indicating where the bust stops are during construction works. It's text with a stick figure walking. The stick figure is not only pixellated, but fucking Jpegged.

One of those flappy signs someone sticks out on the street for a barber shop. Not only is the person in the picture rather pixellated, but the saturation has been jacked up so far he's nearly orange.

An old advert for some theatre production where it's got a beautiful gradient across it due to uneven illumination by the sun. Where's your colour matching now?

A post office sign (JPEGged, natch) printed out on an inkjet, faded and water streaked and taped to the inside of a show window with yellowing tape.

That's a small selection. I happen to have an eye for these things because apparently other people don't feel that jpeg artefacts make their eyes bleed. But I digress. All of those things are professional. Not top end professional, sure, but all professional in that it's all business stuff for business. I'd day 99% of stuff is like that in that it's not some award winning photo, but a cheapass sign necessary for some purpose.

If you think the gimp is not up to "professional" work like that, then your opinion is simply whacky. Ooh look, I put professional in quotes. GIMP is actually more than good enough for 99% of actual professional work.

Re: Get some perspective.

[serviscope_minor]

For those of us who didn't go to art school gimp is more than enough.

I'd say that too. I do photo touch up occasionally with the GIMP. No one seems to be able to tell the photos were modified. I vaguely gather photoshop has some additional tools which might help in certain areas, but the GIMP lets me do a very serviceable job.

Personally I like the GIMP on the whole. There are some things wretched and appalling about it, most of which are inherited from the underlying toolkit, but it's on the whole OK.

But GIMP/GTK: your file dialog sucks even compared to athena. Seriously. If athena did something better than you, you have deeply, massively fucked up somewhere. ...

That's hilarious about undo. :)

Re:Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing few people mention is GIMP's speed! It has to be the slowest image editor in existence. Not just because it doesn't have hardware acceleration, but every plugin and every operation is slow to execute. From applying a simple filter (Gaussian blur) to using the undo feature, it's almost always 2 to 3 times slower than Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or Paint.net, to name a few. It's worth mentioning Paint Shop Pro again, a program I used myself before moving over to Photoshop back in 2006. PSP is the real competitor to Photoshop, more so than GIMP will ever be and it has a UI that isn't shit. I've used more graphics programs than I can remember on everything from the Amiga to an SGI workstation. GIMP's UI is clusterfucked garbage even in single window mode. Any developer who allows a UI panel to be resized so small that it crops off a slider should be taken out back and have a shotgun blasted up his ass.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

I never went to art school, but I've been working with computer graphics for over 30 years. If you can't afford Photoshop, I suggest Paint Shop Pro, the real alternative to Photoshop that is not only affordable but faster than GIMP with a UI that doesn't resemble a partially aborted fetus. I wouldn't recommend GIMP to anyone under any circumstances. Just about every commercial or free alternative is better than GIMP. I also call bullshit on your "undo" story unless you can provide a link citing exactly when that "missing feature" was added to Photoshop. In the meantime, wake me up when GIMP finally has non-destructive adjustment and style layers.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Dagger2]

If a co-worker wants to crop baby photos gimp is the tool. If a co-worker wants to take screenshots and put them in reports gimp is the tool.

Not according to the GIMP developers it's not.

I can only assume this means they'll continue to make GIMP worse for people that just want to use it rather than live their lives with it.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP killed your intuition.

Re: Get some perspective.

[dbIII]

Undo came in with version 5, so only a couple of years after those annoying fanboys were telling me it would never be needed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Anything else you want to do other than call me a liar based on nothing but a guess? Were you really paying attention during those 30 years?

Re:Get some perspective.

[CronoCloud]

Not just because it doesn't have hardware acceleration

Actually it did/does. I know it had both MIPS (including mipsel) and Altivec optimization. Altivec enhancements were why running certain filters is faster on GIMP running on say..a PS3 with a YDL install vs running on X86.

AFAIK GIMP doesn't have any GPU enhancements though.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Piata]

You're essentially arguing that amateur work is professional because it serves a professional purpose. I can get my brother's nephew's cousin who took a design class once to make me a flyer but that doesn't make it professional. Even if I use it to market my business, that in itself doesn't make it professional. Professional work is done by a pro, not by someone who downloaded a program, dropped in some clip art and spent 10 minutes trying to decide between Papyrus or Comic Sans for the text.

All the examples you've given can be done in MS Word, just like html pages can be built in word. That doesn't mean Word is good enough for 99% of actual professional design work, much like GIMP isn't either.

Re:Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

The raw engine in both Photoshop and lightroom ARE EXACTLY THE SAME.

Re: Get some perspective.

[MrKrillls]

Both Gimp and Photoshop interfaces leave a great deal to be desired. Once I fought my way through Photoshop, I became just tolerably comfortable with it. Now I am fighting my way through Gimp. Gimp's just as non-intuitive. It feels worse because habits from Photoshop make me look first in the wrong places. I'll learn. I'll curse.

I think it has most to do with what one learns first on.

Re: Get some perspective.

[frank_adrian314159]

And it's a shame that all of the content mentioned sucked, usually also containing misused apostrophes and poor grammar. Because that's the important thing - not what fucking tool you use to gin up the graphics.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

Photoshop is for professionals who need to do real work. GIMP is a toy for little kids and immature adults who are fooling themselves. That's all there is to it.

We've been using it for five years to produce/prepare graphics for our products, then again, maybe we're not doing real work. We've a factory unit, employ several hundred people, have two physical shops, a couple of web outlets, do commisions/bespoke items, and on top of our own products, we've a couple of rolling contracts doing stuff for other companies.

GIMP drives about 95% of the bitmap graphics side of things here, Corel the vector side, and various CAD/CAM packages for the CNC work.

If we're fooling ourselves, then long may it continue..

Re: Get some perspective.

[Anonymous Coward]

...Professional work is done by a pro, not by someone who downloaded a program, dropped in some clip art and spent 10 minutes trying to decide between Papyrus or Comic Sans for the text.

You know, that's an almost *exact* description of the majority of the professional graphics people I have to deal with.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Zontar The Mindless]

I've produced images for several books using GIMP. Good enough for Apress, Wiley, and a couple of other publishers. I've also been using GIMP to produce images for about the last ten years or so for my job with one of the world's biggest software companies, and these appear to be good enough for use in some of the most heavily used online documentation on the planet.

I'd consider that at least as "professional" as some AC's unknown use cases.

Re: Get some perspective.

[Zontar The Mindless]

And it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Adobe's not likely to port Photoshop to Linux until the day after Hell freezes over.

A good point, but poorly phrased.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: A good point, but poorly phrased.

[Anonymous Coward]

Always haters somewhere... Quit whining you liberal. GIMP is an excellent program.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[Anrego]

Trying to write anything using GTK after using Qt feels like going back in time. It's amazing that GTK is still around and so popular, it really is shit.

Dunno if I'd stretch it as far as you have, but definitely agree that as a toolkit Qt kicks GTK's ass and always has.

Re: A good point, but poorly phrased.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Haters"? What do you think this is, Hacker News? You expect us to be a bunch of limp-wristed Millennial hipsters who care about the feelings of other people?

Son, we do hate Gtk+, and it has earned every single bit of hatred that it gets. It's inferior to Qt. It's as simple as that!

I'm surprised you didn't toss around a false accusation about us being "disingenuous". Or did you intentionally hold back, thinking we wouldn't spot you as being the Bay Area wiener that you are?

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[jblues]

GTK grew a crazy C object system and, eventually, Vala, which is pretty cool. Vala is like Apple Swift's distant, evil cousin. I would love to get the chance to program in Qt, given that everyone says it is superior and Qt apps generally look pretty. One thing though: Since about 2003, I've preferred the look/feel of Gnome over KDE.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[unixisc]

So what are the Qt based equivalents of GIMP? Krita?

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Mod to to 5: knows his shit, and is correct.

I was in a store yesterday and saw this book on the shelves: http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Bible-Christopher-Negus/dp/1118999878/

Curious, I just opened it to the center and flipped a few pages with one hand. It was Gnome and Redhat shit. I just thought to myself... fucking tools. Even Linus Torvalds thought Gnome was weak. Even if he tried to be nice about it later... you still know it's weak. I drew my own conclusions based on using it myself.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4-to-be-a-total-user-experience-design-failure/

That being said, it's nice there are many options.

KDE/Qt is awesome. It's my favorite. It's far nicer than Windows and OS X. GIMP is a great application itself and has always been the only reason I let GTK libraries install at all. Gnome has annoyed me too many times to even install it any more. The GTK libraries just take up disc space but it's not an issue these days with large storage being the norm. Many times have I installed GIMP and thought damn I hate needing all these libraries (dependencies). I stopped Redhat at 7.3 and would never use Ubuntu because those are the two Microsoft wannabes of Linux world.

If you want to use it in Windows I suggest the portable version. You can get it here.
http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/gimp_portable

distrowatch.com and pick a Linux.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[Tough Love]

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...

Succinct analysis, but it's not about ideology any more, it's strictly commercial. It's about Redhat controlling freedesktop.org, which control would be materially loosened by sharing power with the QT Foundation. Community be damned.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[slashdice]

Even better -- at the time, GNUStep was the "official" GNU desktop. Both Solaris and GNU/Linux could have been OS X but they bet on the wrong horse (Java and GNOME, respectively)

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[dbIII]

Don't blame the toolkit for gnome politics. It was a victim not the perpetrator. The gnome people just looked for something already available to use and chose GTK.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[dbIII]

It's just a toolkit. Gimp could be ported to it just like Mozilla was (in less than 24 hours after source code release). But there is no point because it's just a toolkit. There's none of the other gnome weirdness in gimp so there's not a lot to change. Menus, button etc are the least of what makes gimp useful.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[zwarte piet]

Can't be worse than that Borland owl shit or Mircrosoft Frustration Classes

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[jcupitt65]

It's not so easy. The whole of GIMP is programmed using C and GObject, the gtk object system. You could move the front end to Qt (though it would be years and years of work), but the back end would still be all gtk.

In fact, the UI is probably the largest part of GIMP. The actual image processing is rather small and simple.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[dbIII]

In fact, the UI is probably the largest part of GIMP. The actual image processing is rather small and simple.

Seriously?
It was spun off as a library so it wouldn't be the largest part of gimp, not that I agree with that point either.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[jcupitt65]

Sure. It's hard to get an estimate for the whole of gimp, but look at one of the plugins, eg. lighting:

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/plug-ins/lighting

In that plugin, apply, image and shade (about 1500 lines) contain the actual image processing code. The rest (about 2600 lines) is all UI and plumbing. And that's for a plugin, where most of the UI is supplied by GIMP. The code for something like the paintbush will be more like 90% UI and 10% processing.

You could also look at GEGL, the new image processing library that gimp is supposed to be switching to. That's currently 5mb of code to gimp's 20mb.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[Barefoot Monkey]

Pardon me for replying to your signature rather than your actual post, but if it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then isn't it actually an auto_ptr<Duck> rather than a shared_ptr<Duck>?

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[Barefoot Monkey]

Never mind, I was just displaying my ignorance there :p - auto_ptr is deprecated and shared_ptr serves the same purpose but does it better. Now I know.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[tibit]

Inkscape and GIMP are similar here in that you don't need to port all of glib to Qt. Only the UI. The core, at least in case of Inkscape, uses glib heavily and GObject isn't really QObject. The two had different design goals and are used differently. The biggest problem in both gimp and Inkscape is the fact that they are written in C or C-compiled-with-C++, pretty much. We have these comparatively big desktop apps written as if it was 1995 and compilers were stupid...

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[dbIII]

To use a car analogy you are comparing a new F1 race car to an old truck with two trailers that have been attached over the years :)

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[budgenator]

A while back Robin Rowe, forked of a branch of GIMP version 1.0.4, added a few features and called it FilmGIMP and later Cinepaint and it actually worked pretty well for film frame editing. Then there was a need to adapt to 16 bit color channels to support image formats like Cineon, DPX and OpenEXR, while doing that they also attempted to port from GTK+ to a much more spartan and significantly less resource intense FLTK; the result was a 6 year wait for the next release, and I doubt the FLTK was in the new release and that was 2 and a half years ago.
I thought either projects were big, with a significant probability of failure, but both together just seemed insane.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how you say 'ideological' to mean that people made the technical decision to use a best-of-breed object system like used by Java and Python will full run-time introspection and bindings to all modern languages rather than a system that has evolved separately from C++ since before C++ got templates.

What's amazing is how QT zealots were for years touting their super cool 'signals and slots' dynamic technology that was essentially lists of function pointers as seen since the first days of C.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[jblues]

Ah, why thank you sir :) I was wondering why my signature had been leaking all over the place. Fixed.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[jblues]

Oops, and I just changed it too :P . . I only dabble in C++ when I have the time, though I'd love to do more.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[bill_tvm]

The problem with QT is that they use their own macro language over c++, and your source is no longer pure C++. I wish the QT project would get rid of moc, and use pure C++, instead of this non-standard dialect of C++. Perhaps with the recent features added to C++, the moc mechanism is no longer necessary.

Re:A good point, but poorly phrased.

[Anrego]

I won't argue that moc and the voodoo it does it's scary, but the thing is.. it works really damn well. By contrast the weird crap GTK does (with things like glade) is simpler but often causes problems that are a headache to sort out (at least for me).

Speedy Slashdot

[viperidaenz]

Posted by samzenpus on 2015-11-22 16:00 from the happy-birthday dept.

On November 21st, 20 years ago today

Netcraft has confirmed: Slashdot is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Re:Netcraft has confirmed: Slashdot is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, they are still arguing like the GIMP will amount to anything.

Re:Dependency with SystemD

[Billly Gates]

Too bad the latest version is integrated with SystemD so you can't leave init.

Port Paint.net to Linux

[Billly Gates]

How about we port Paint.net to Linux using Mono? It is opensourced and can do many of the same functions. It can't be too hard to port and will require hell of alot less effort than rewriting Gimp. It is designed for plugins and already has a much better menu system

Re:Port Paint.net to Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

There's Pinta:

Pinta is a free, open source drawing/editing program modeled after Paint.NET. Its goal is to provide users with a simple yet powerful way to draw and manipulate images on Linux, Mac, Windows, and *BSD.

Re:Port Paint.net to Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

How about we port Paint.net to Linux using Mono?

How about we don't.

Tried it, couldn't use it

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

User Experience design is what killed it. Lack of ease of use for moving stuff around, making raster vs vector-like graphics. It seems they tried to combine vector and raster together, and did a piss poor job, while simultaneously not putting the software through usability tests by people who would actually use it productively: artists who are not computer savvy.

I'm a better software developer than I am an artist, and my experience tells me, if software doesn't do what you'd think it should do based on what it's presenting to you, then the user won't be sticking around for long. Click and drag is click and drag. Drawing a pixel is drawing a pixel.

Maybe it's the story of all-in-one printers/fax/scanner/copier: it tries to do too much, and doesn't have room to excel at anything.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you've been trained to used Photoshop and Corel Draw, no wonder you suck at using Gimp...

I have the opposite problem: when I first got started doing things with computer graphics, maybe 15 years ago, I learnt how to use Gimp. Now I attend a school where they only have Photoshop and I can't use it - or to be more precise, I can't be bothered to learn a new tool to do something I can do perfectly well with the tool I know how to use.

So I still do not use Photoshop. Gimp is fine for me. I do photo editing, image composition, and I draw webcomics with it. I use it with my Wacom tablet without any trouble. I save documents in XCF format when I am working on them, and I do jpeg exports when I am done with them. I can save as CMYK with it. I can edit RAW photos with it. I can write my own extensions for it (although I reckon documentation is lacking on that level, it is not as much lacking as Photoshop's). I know how to use it. It is the right tool for me.

Many folks are asking to turn Gimp into Photoshop. Please don't do that. I do not want Photoshop. If I wanted Photoshop I would buy Photoshop, thank you very much. But I want Gimp. Please keep Gimp the way it is.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Mass Overkiller]

I used GIMP for a while. Then I needed to design a CD cover for my band. I downloaded PixelMator for my Mac and used that. It felt like I could do the same project in GIMP but it would have taken a lot longer. I bought PixelMator when the trial ran out, because I used that program a little more often, and I completed my CD project using it, so I felt that the developers should be compensated. I would have bought GIMP too, if it worked out of the box for my particular needs (import multiple-layer PDF and export in CYMK PDF).

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

I use GIMP on a regular basis - nothing fancy, though - just cropping and scaling and occasionally adding some text to an image. It works fine for those purposes.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[unixisc]

When you open GIMP, it throws up so many Windows that I just get totally confused

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[phantomfive]

That was roughly my experience, too. I spent many hours trying to learn to use Gimp, going through tutorials, etc. I was learning it, able to use it. Then I finally got a chance to use photoshop, and somehow everything seemed more intuitive (that's a relative term, I guess). I've basically given up on Gimp for a while.

Inkscape, on the other hand, is quite nice.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Kergan]

Why use Gimp in that case? For that kind of stuff, MS Paint works...

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[nnull]

That's because Photoshop is just better. I can train someone to use Photoshop in 5 minutes, even people that are not computer savvy. Try to train someone to use GIMP, it'll take ages. I can't even train myself to use GIMP with that horrible UI. I mean good God, the Photoshop UI has barely changed for YEARS and it just works. GIMP has been utilizing that horrible UI for years and doesn't want to change.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[ChrisMaple]

Documentation is a severe problem. The basic stuff is there, but about half of the trickier stuff either has incomplete coverage or is missing altogether. Most plugins have no documentation at all.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Ramze]

There was a fork called GIMPshop that made the UI more like photoshop. Unfortunately, the author abandoned the project after someone else scooped up the website gimpshop.com and made money off of ads and installer/crapware (and donations as well, I think).

Would be nice if someone would fork it again, but there's the rub -- not everyone that cares is a coder and those that are must be working on more rewarding projects... or have lives or something.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[binarstu]

When you open GIMP, it throws up so many Windows that I just get totally confused

This complaint has cropped up several times on this thread already. That is somewhat incredible, because GIMP has supported a single-window interface for years. Select "Single-Window Mode" from the "Windows" menu, and the "so many windows" will become one window.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[interval1066]

You know there is an option in Gimp to make it a one-window-app like all other apps, Right? Don't ask me to tell you where it is, after a few hours of searching for it and actually using it I'm burnt out.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Must admit it was the first I'd heard of it. Back when I first installed gimp I spent ages looking for such a feature, but I guess over the years of nothing changing on that front I'd just given up and resigned myself to the messy multi-window mess mode (give or take a brief flirtation with gimpshop).

Anyhow I've ticked that box now and must say gimp is looking much nicer - so thanks to you and others :)

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Yeah, there was basically a feature request for single-window mode that languished in "WONTFIX" status for fifteen years or so, with the same developer repeatedly shitting all over the latest chump who asked why GIMP still didn't support it in 20XX. Then that developer had a kid, or discovered girls, or something, and he kind of retired from GIMP. Sometime after that (2008-ish, maybe?), the team hired out a sort of a freelance UI consultant, and he took one look at it and said, "OMG, why don't you have a single-window mode in 2008, it's not like your users don't want it", and nobody had a good answer for that. So they finally implemented it. I had been eagerly following the saga for years at that point, installing each new version within a week of release, and it still took me a few days to figure out that they'd added it, they were so bitterly reticent about it.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[tepples]

I can't even train myself to use GIMP with that horrible UI.

Does that include having tried choosing Single-Window Mode from the Windows menu?

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[binarstu]

...they were so bitterly reticent about it.

Are you sure about that? Single-window mode was the top "new feature" that the GIMP team highlighted in the version 2.8 release notes. It seemed like it was a feature they were excited to have, not something they were trying to quietly implement without anyone noticing.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[dbIII]

Maybe it was me, maybe it wasn't

It's not a coreldraw or photoshop clone it is it's own thing instead of a later copy so treating it like a copy will only end in disappointment.
If you have already paid for the other ones why are you using gimp?

As for me, I went from AutoCAD to photoshop and was extremely pissed off that it did not have undo at the time - treating it like something else will only end in disappointment.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[dbIII]

While meanwhile photoshop has gone multi-window like gimp used to be :)
Once people got more than a single workspace (virtual desktops) or another monitor it made sense to go that way.
Still, if you are stuck on a single monitor with no virtual desktops the single window gimp where you use the application as a window manger (to make up for the shortcomings of the OS) sort of makes sense.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure about that? Single-window mode was the top "new feature" that the GIMP team highlighted in the version 2.8 release notes [gimp.org]. It seemed like it was a feature they were excited to have, not something they were trying to quietly implement without anyone noticing.

They might have been "excited" in the sense that they knew this was a major feature which would have been the final hurdle to a lot of people actually sticking with using GIMP. I know in my case I didn't start seriously trying out GIMP until this feature came out because the windowing bullshit was just too annoying to deal with. So they knew that they'd get more users by marketing this new feature, but would be internally bitter about it because they didn't feel as though they should have had to implement it in the first place.

The fact it took so long and sat as a WONTFIX for the longest time shows that they had far more faith in the multi-window implementation than people actually had for it. They had a disconnect between how they thought the GIMP should operate and how regular people who just want to edit some photos wanted to use the program.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

20 Years and GIMP still doesn't do 48-bit color. Requests for this simple feature goes back at least as far as 2004. It's been an "Any Release Now" feature for as long as I can remember. The applications I would use it for simply cannot be done in 8-bit color,

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[graphius]

I started using Photoshop at version 3.0. and used it for several versions until it got too expensive. I moved to GIMP for several years, and got quite good using it, but then I had an opportunity to try Photoshop again. I hunkered down and learned the "new way" of using Photoshop, with layer masks, adjustment layers, etc. Gimp can do a lot of similar things, but not as easily, as quickly, or as accurately. (accurate may not be the right word, but it is much easier to fine tune things in Photoshop)
In short, once I learned Photoshop, I could do the same things that I could do in GIMP but better, and there were things I could do in Photoshop that were just too complicated in GIMP.
Different people may have different needs, but GIMP is not a Photoshop replacement

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[serviscope_minor]

Yeah, there was basically a feature request for single-window mode that languished in "WONTFIX" status for fifteen years or so, with the same developer repeatedly shitting all over the latest chump who asked why GIMP still didn't support it in 20XX.

The "fix" is to get a window manager that doesn't suck. If you have a non sucky WM, then the GIMP UI is actually very good, much better than the single window mode. I, for one, am glad they didn't wreck the UI to make whiny users happy until they had the time to make it optional.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

I certainly do understand your point but it's not so easy to say "get a better WM" when most of your userbase is reporting from Windows. It's probably the same userbase who complain that Gimp isn't a Photoshop clone and therefore has a "terrible UI".

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimp 2.9 has this feature right now

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I can't be bothered to learn a new tool to do something I can do perfectly well with the tool I know how to use.

No wonder you suck at learning anything new. But don't worry, next year in 4th grade you'll be a pro.

It'll be a hoot to see you sink like a stone in the real world where "learning something new" is frequently required.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[CronoCloud]

The "fix" is to get a window manager that doesn't suck. If you have a non sucky WM

what something out of 1987 like TWM? Or some other archaic thing like Icewm, Windowmaker, or one of the fluxbox variants?

That's one of the big issues with open source development, too many developers are stuck in the past and use computers like it was 1964 or 74 or 84.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[serviscope_minor]

AH yes, what a nice argument free rant. Old is not equivalent to bad. The new style of window managers just copy osx or Windows. If you want Windows, go and pay for it. Or you know, vaguely insult anyone who disagrees.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[CronoCloud]

Old isn't bad, but if say someone designs an application like it's only going to be used by members of the "bearded computer priesthood at MIT in 1972", then they might find that people who DON'T use computers like members of the "MIT bearded priesthood" are going to have issues with it.

Designing GIMP so that it was annoying under modern KDE/GNOME/XFCE, (even back in 2002 that was the case) and then having the GIMPdeveloper equivalent to the "Bearded priesthood" tell GIMP users they were "doing it wrong" and should use some old-fashioned WM like TWM or some other tiling WM, wasn't really the best way to handle the UI issues.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[serviscope_minor]

Hey you know that awesome free piece of software you're just giving away compete with source code?? Well, I use a cruddy window manager that tries hard to emulate a system you neither like nor use, and it doesn't work well. Can you waste time reimplement half a good window manager (using code you'll never use because you have a good window manager), rather than work on cool new features that you will use because I want a free knock off version of Windows, not Linux. And no, I won't be paying you.

If you never offered money our source code, you're complaining that people giving you stuff for free I their spare time weren't giving you the right stuff for free.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

I gave up using GIMP when I discovered that while it is easy to create layers, it is impossible to get to them and work on them after creating them.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[Jim Hall]

I can speak to this. I focus a lot of my free time on the usability of free/open source software, and a few years ago, I looked into the usability of GIMP. I didn't do a full usability test, but conducted surveys of different people who used GIMP, versus Photoshop. What I found is that a person's perception of GIMP's usability depends on their familiarity with Photoshop:

People who used Photoshop all the time complained that GIMP had poor usability. This seemed to be because people knew they way around Photoshop very well, and were put off when the same functions were not accessed via the same menu path, or were called something slightly different. So they felt lost, like GIMP was broken even though they recognized it was very powerful.

People who used Photoshop occasionally, but not all the time commented that GIMP had good usability. These users understood the basic concepts behind Photoshop, such as layers and channels and plugins and tools, and could transfer that knowledge easily to GIMP. Because they didn't have a "muscle memory" of Photoshop, these users weren't put off by having the same functionality located elsewhere or with a slightly different name, because they probably didn't remember exactly what the feature was called in Photoshop, or in what exact menu it was located.

People who did not use Photoshop said that GIMP had poor usability. That seemed to be because these users didn't understand the basic concepts of Photoshop, about layers or tools or filters or what a "raster" image was, and felt overwhelmed by GIMP. If these users did any image manipulation at all, they used a simple "Paint" program like Microsoft Paint.

From your comment, it sounds like you use Photoshop quite often. So I'm not surprised you find GIMP has poor usability.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[CronoCloud]

And THAT attitude is one of the reasons Linux on the desktop has such a small amount of users.

Users are why software exists in the first place. Now I know in the open source movement, some developers get a big head and talk about scratching a personal itch, but when you release the thing to the public then you have an ethical responsibility to the users.

Sure you can put a no warranty clause in the license, but disrespect the userbase and then the software has no users. And software that has no users is dead software.

The gimp developers KNEW that most of their userbase, even on Linux, was using non-tiling WM's And one guy living in the past of WM's stood in the way of implementing a single window mode that would have benefitted more users than practically any other feature since EVERYONE has to deal with the UI.

Besides.. "new features"? How long have they been working on GEGL now....15 YEARS.

So don't give me that "bearded FSF Zealot style" lecture accusing people that complain of being "freeloaders". If you don't want people to use the software for free...start a company, release binaries, don't release the source and charge money.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[budgenator]

Why is have separate toolboxes and dialogues confusing? Ever use multiple monitors?

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

>From your comment, it sounds like you use Photoshop quite often. So I'm not surprised you find GIMP has poor usability.

Actually, it was just the opposite- I started off using GIMP. Photoshop was kind of arcane and confusing to me and I kept trying to use GIMP.

Photoshop was a no-go in my book as I couldn't afford it. So I used GIMP on and off for over a year, and after some time I ended up at a place where I had access to Photoshop. After a few times using it I found it to be more intuitive (at least for me, I can't speak to anyone else's experience).

Really, I tried GIMP doggedly and it just never clicked with me...my guess is that the people at Adobe did some serious user-experience testing and made it more intuitive for the average Joe to get started with.

I tried GIMP again a about a year ago and although it was a lot better, it still didn't "click" with me. That's just my experience, it may be the opposite for other people.

Re:Tried it, couldn't use it

[serviscope_minor]

And THAT attitude is one of the reasons Linux on the desktop has such a small amount of users.

Nonetheless it is true. You are complaining that something given to you for free is not good enough.

Now I know in the open source movement, some developers get a big head and talk about scratching a personal itch, but when you release the thing to the public then you have an ethical responsibility to the users.

You have an ethical responsibility to ont fuck up their computer. That's it. There's no responsibility to do free work. As the old saying goes: it's free so if it breaks you get to keep both halves.

The gimp developers KNEW that most of their userbase, even on Linux, was using non-tiling WM's

Tiling WMs? what the fuck are you on about?

And one guy living in the past of WM's stood in the way of implementing a single window mode that would have benefitted more users than practically any other feature since EVERYONE has to deal with the UI

So some guy who wrote a bunch of free stuff and gave it away for free didn't want to take patches to make the software worse for him to use. gee I can't imagine why. But when someone figured how to have the best of both worlds and make it optional, it got in.

Besides.. "new features"? How long have they been working on GEGL now....15 YEARS.

And it's been in GIMP for a chunk of that. For the 2.10 release it's on track to have replaced all the old code. This is great. They did a major rewrite of the very core of the software and never once lost a feature or made it a buggy piece of crap. Impresie work, especiall for a largely volunteer effort!

If you don't want people to use the software for free...start a company, release binaries, don't release the source and charge money.

Ah yes. Because they gave it away for free they're "ethically obliged" to make it worse for themselves to make a bunch of non-contributing whiners on the internet happy. Christ! Entitled or what!

Sure you can put a no warranty clause in the license, but disrespect the userbase and then the software has no users. And software that has no users is dead software.

So? They started off writing it for themselves. It won't affect their ability to edit images if no one else uses it. Sure it's nice and gives warm fuzzy feelings when other people find it useful, but then that gets washed down with an ice-water bucket of people complaining biterly you haven't given them EVEN MORE for free.

Fork?

[antdude]

Why not fork from them and make your own Gimp version since it is open sourced?

Re:Fork?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's easier to let this kind of stuff die on its own. Anyone who is remotely serious about this stuff pays for it and runs it on a GUI that is not Linux. It's not a knock on open source, it's more a critique of broke college students screwing things up because they have gotten used to being spoon fed their entire lives. Seriously, F Gimp, it blows like kateland. What does it say about you if you want to be blown by kateland? Please get it together, stoners.

Re:Fork?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad your piece of shit opinion does not matter.

Awful UI, buggy, doc out of date

[Anonymous Coward]

Each time I'm using GIMP it makes me angry.

A standard task like separating object/background takes a whole
tutorial to figure out: https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tutorial-quickie-separate.html

The docs don't agree with the actual software (at least for the Mac version I'm using).

Adding/changing text to images is buggy as hell.

Good luck finding the layers list in the menu. Hint: it's *not* under 'Layer'.

Stay away, if possible use other tools.

Re:Awful UI, buggy, doc out of date

[ChrisMaple]

When used in the traditional gimp multiple-windows mode, the layers list has a separate window shared with paths, channels, and undo history. It's always there, ready for quick use without going through the menu.

Dealing with text in gimp is very inconvenient at best. A completely new technique is needed, something like "text objects" that could be moved, resized, and edited long after their original creation.

Re:Awful UI, buggy, doc out of date

[tepples]

Dealing with text in gimp is very inconvenient at best. A completely new technique is needed, something like "text objects" that could be moved, resized, and edited long after their original creation.

GIMP has had this for years.

Re:Awful UI, buggy, doc out of date

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so it's had it for years, but if I and other infrequent users don't know about it, then might as well not be there. I can fire up Libre Office, or Inkscape, once every couple of months when I need to use them, and can quite happily drool-and-click my way to what I need to do, but the gimp? I'm going to need to google tutorials *every* *time*. When I find it easier to load an XP virtual machine, re-install PaintShop Pro (including grepping my emails for license info) and use that instead of the gimp that's already natively installed, well, the gimp has a usability problem.

Re:Awful UI, buggy, doc out of date

[tepples]

GIMP had switched from writing the text onto a regular layer to putting text on its own layer by 2.4 at the latest, possibly even 2.0, I forget. But what is a program supposed to do when it offers a major revamp to one of its tools? Remember that you had used the tool in the past and then interrupt you with a forced tutorial about the improvement the next time you use the program?

Re:Dependency with SystemD

[Zero__Kelvin]

You are such a frigging moron. Seriously. Just STFU about systemd. Nobody gives a shit that you are butthurt that the Linux community as a whole has decided to go in a direction you don't like with regard to it. It's over. You lost. So just stop polluting the frigging internet with your childish rants about it. Thanks.

How does GIMP make money?

[zennling]

Does it at all? Is it completely a labour of love? I havent used it in a while, but it was (is?) ad free - is that still the case?

Re:Dependency with SystemD

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny, it runs just fine on Windows or OS X without SystemD.

GNOME is the real offender here. Pretty sure you can still get GIMP to build without the dependency.

Twenty years

[Anonymous Coward]

And it still sucks donkeyballs.

Gnu image is a quality product

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I use Gnu Image manipulation program all the time in game development. I fortunately saved a version just before the adware got bundled in. Whew.

Re:Gnu image is a quality product

[serviscope_minor]

Adware? What are you talking about?

The only thing that fits is the adware that sourceforge bundled in, on Windows. If you get GIMP from the gimp website, it's 100% ad free as it will always be.

Re:Gnu image is a quality product

[Anonymous Coward]

What adware? If you're using some random windows installer from a crappy third-party download site like Sourceforge then you might get adware, but then that's not the proper way to get software anyway. Use the installer from the official project website.

gtk+

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:gtk+

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

And it would have been fine if it had ended there. Unfortunately, the GNOME people took over the development of GTK, and for each new version it gets more Gnome-ified.

Give it a few more versions, and GIMP will require Gnome and with it the entire Potterix software stack.

Re:gtk+

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately...
GTK- is popular but full of crap.
Qt is infinitely better.

Re:gtk+

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another thing to blame it for.

Pinta crashes on the Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

I just tried it on Mac OS X Mavericks, and it crashed immediately during launch.

Yes, I have their preferred version of the Mono framework installed.

what a coincidence!

[Anonymous Coward]

My gimp is also 20 years old. (We got him when he was 18). His asshole isn't as tight as it used to be (whose is, am i right?) but he can take a lot more cock than he used and doesn't whimper and cry when he sees a 10" uncut black dick. Thanks for the good times.

20 years...

[Anonymous Coward]

of a fucked up name (albeit one that is often rather descriptive of the program) that has kept it from being a serious contender to commercial products in all markets, but especially for business and enterprise.

Re:20 years...

[Anonymous Coward]

> ...has kept it from being a serious contender to commercial products in all markets, but especially for business and enterprise.

Hogwash. GIMP is licensed as GPL3, and there's nothing in terms of that license stopping you from forking and renaming your fork however you please.

Re:20 years...

[Anonymous Coward]

American slang is not universal, no matter how much slang you've exported over the decades with the help of Hollywood. Gimp is a reasonable initialism of the project's long name when used in the rest of the world.

Re:20 years...

[CronoCloud]

Hi there Gimp developer!

There it is, the old "The name isn't offensive to foreigners" excuse Yeah that's the standard Gimpdev response now since euro-devs now. dominate Gimp development The classic "Gimpel is an attractive european bullfinch" response, for example.

Well, that's bunk. As TFA states, the GIMP was a project at an AMERICAN university, started by NATIVE English speakers who should have known better than to give it that name but were so in love with their own cleverness and geeky-Pulp fiction-reference-making that they kept it.

They should have known better.

Gimp is dead. But Krita is alive and well.

[Anonymous Coward]

To those not in the know, Krita is officially a digital painting and illustration app. But its feature set is amazing, almost on par with Photoshop, whereas Gimp still lacks basic features that photoshop had 15 years ago. Those who seek a photshop replacement will find it a much better tool. Krita is also lovde by its user based (not just tolerated!), actively maintained and new features are added all the time.

Re:Gimp is dead. But Krita is alive and well.

[juanfgs]

To those not in the know, Krita is officially a digital painting and illustration app

And for all the people sad because of the apple shortage, don't worry! we have a lot of oranges for you!

Re:Gimp is dead. But Krita is alive and well.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Krita is officially a digital painting and illustration app.

You forgot to mention that it's KDE, which is a non-starter where I work.

Re:Dependency with SystemD

[zwarte piet]

it runs not even half the speed on windows as it does on linux

Awesome tool - even my kids love it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome tool - even my kids love it
Because Gimp sounds really weird, they call it "Wolfs brush" (it sounds better in my language) :)

Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

I used GIMP many times in the past. At one point i was so frustrated and angered about the horrible usability of the program that i swore that i will never use it again. Haven't since.

Time to rewrite GIMP n Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

GTK- is dead.

Motif GUI

[sad_]

I remember the first time i ever started gimp. It was on this OSS CD i bought (because back then, you bought your OSS software on CD because downloading was to expensive and would take to much time).
It was even worse then MS Paint, it had this Motif GUI and looked horrible, it also couldn't do much, i didn't leave it installed on my system.
Second time i tried it, there was no need anymore to buy a CD and it was included in the distro. Motif was replace by the Gimp ToolKit and Gimp itself was able to do already some nifty stuff.

Corel Draw GIMP

[Anonymous Coward]

Corel Draw > GIMP
PaintShop Pro > GIMP
Paint.NET > GIMP

GIMP is perhaps the most aptly named ope source project ever.

gimp
noun
Definition of GIMP
1
: cripple 1a
2
: limp <walks with a gimp — Damon Runyon>

Guess this means we're officially old

[SpencerWKimball]

Peter and I created the GIMP to scratch an itch. In my experience, that's always the best motivation to start work on an ambitious software project.

We'd just gotten to the University of California at Berkeley. It was 1993. Pete was a freshman, I was a sophomore. Unix was new to us; we'd come from a world of 68K Macs and PCs running Windows 3.1. Berkeley opened up a wonderful new world of discovery. We were blown away by the Unix philosophy, the free software ethos, and the powerful tools whose fundamentals were just laid out in the open, begging to be understood and learned from. Richard Stallman was like some kind of God to us. We fell over ourselves to dump Windows and install Linux and FreeBSD. I even bought a used Sun Microsystems Sparcstation running SunOS 4.1.3. No day went by where I failed to learn something new.

But we missed Photoshop. Dual booting to Windows or keeping the old Mac around felt impure. Xv, xpaint, netpbm were all cool and useful tools but they felt limiting. So one night we sat down and wrote up a manifesto of what we wanted from such a program. I wish we still had a copy of that original document, but it's been long lost.

There was a point somewhere through the first year of development where someone else posted on comp.windows.x.apps mentioning their work on a remarkably similar application, but with even more features, and it sounded a lot further along with development. We were crushed. All of our excitement at our progress and hopes that we could make a meaningful contribution back to the community turned to ash in our mouths. We were listless and didn't work on it much over the course of a week or so, but then our original enthusiasm returned and we said, "what the hell..." and got back to work. We kept expecting the competing application to appear at any moment, but we never heard from that original poster again. So a word of advice: talk is cheap, ideas are cheap. Execution counts for everything.

Peter and I are still working together. More than 22 years now. We worked together at Google to build the Google Servlet Engine and Colossus. We've started two companies together, most recently Cockroach Labs to build CockroachDB: https://github.com/cockroachdb....

It's a wonderful thing to see how far open source software has come and how pervasive and influential. We stopped working on the GIMP in 1997 and it's only gotten better and better over the years. It's one of the first pieces of software I download when I get a new MacBook. Viva el GIMP! With luck, it'll see another couple of decades, or be surpassed by another ambitious open source project, brought to life by people who want to give back, make a name, or just solve a problem which won't stop bugging them.

Re:Guess this means we're officially old

[Anonymous Coward]

> Peter and I created the GIMP to scratch an itch.
> We've started two companies together, most recently Cockroach Labs to build CockroachDB

Glad to see your taste in picking names for your projects has improved. :)

great write up but...

[Anonymous Coward]

his name is Spencer Kimball, not Kimball Spencer .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Kimball_(computer_programmer)

No 2.8.16 for mac yet

[jalvarez13]

I went to the download section of gimp.org, but it shows 2.8.14 only...

Re:Fork (Cinepaint & Krita for HDR)

[darkonc]

Cinepaint forked a number of years ago -- it's main purpose was to support 32bit per channel color (needed by the film industry). I don't use it now because it doesn't compile on Ubuntu based distributions -- which I now use for my desktops.

Krita is what I use now -- even though it's explicit orientation is to digital painting than image editing, it still works quite well for image editing, and supports HDR images. HDR imaging has been important for me since I moved to digital photography. Modern DSLR's produce HDR raw images, so downgrading to 8 bit before manipulating an image can be rather counter-productive, and requires annoying work-arounds to take advantage of the available dynamic range in GIMP.

Re:Dependency with SystemD

[exomondo]

So patch it or find somebody to do it for you, that's what Free Software is all about.

Time to reimplement it in Qt 5 :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is up for that project ?