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20 Years of GIMP (gimp.org)
jones_supa writes: Back in 1995, University of California students Peter Mattis and Kimball Spencer were members of the eXperimental Computing Facility, a Berkeley campus organization. In June of that year, the two hinted at their intentions to write a free graphical image manipulation program as a means of giving back to the free software community. On November 21st, 20 years ago today, Peter Mattis announced the availability of the "General Image Manipulation Program" on Usenet (later "GNU Image Manipulation Program"). Over the years, GIMP amassed a huge amount of new features designed for all kinds of users and practical applications: general image editing, retouching and color grading, digital painting, graphic design, science imaging, and so on. To celebrate the 20th anniversary, there is an update of the current stable branch of GIMP. The newly released version 2.8.16 features support for layer groups in OpenRaster files, fixes for layer groups support in PSD, various user interface improvements, OSX build system fixes, translation updates, and more.
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.
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?
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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.
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.
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