
First Issue Of GIMP Magazine Coming - Garbage
http://www.muktware.com/3992/first-issue-gimp-magazine-coming
======
tammer
OT, but something I've been wondering for a while:

Why, WHY is it called "The GIMP"? I mean, I understand the acronym. I
understand that nerds in general (such as myself) are the kind of folks who
look past names and appearances and judge just about everything on its
content.

But whenever I attempt even explain the benefit of linux to a layperson,
inevitably the user's need to "run apps like Photoshop" will come up. And
inevitably, I'll tell them that there's a similar program that's entirely
free, which they become excited about. Then I tell them the name and they
immediately make quite a number of assumptions.

The name sounds amateurish and unstable. It sounds like some Windows freeware
that installs a toolbar or two, not a powerful image editor or a real
alternative to something called Photoshop.

And don't get me wrong, I think the software itself is great and I use it
constantly! But for software, just like any product, image and impression are
quite important.

~~~
tomku
The GIMP started off as a college project, and I'm guessing that the name was
a product of youthful cleverness combined with no expectations that it would
ever become a widely-used open source project.

As far as why it's still named that nearly 20 years later, there are lots of
decent potential reasons and a couple bad ones. Branding and a loss of
mindshare is a concern, as anyone who watched the early days of Firefox (or
Phoenix, or Firebird, or...) could tell you. It's also a fair bit of work if
you want to actually change the name everywhere and not have all the code
break spectacularly. Naturally, there's also the chance that the maintainers
just don't care. It's easy to write off people who are offended or express
dislike for the name as the overly-sensitive political correctness police, and
I've seen many people (although none in an official position afaik) do so in
previous discussions like this.

~~~
keeperofdakeys
> Naturally, there's also the chance that the maintainers just don't care.
> It's easy to write off people who are offended or express dislike for the
> name as the overly-sensitive political correctness police, and I've seen
> many people (although none in an official position afaik) do so in previous
> discussions like this.

I've had a close call of being banned from an IRC channel after mentioning the
Brain Fuck Scheduler (a different task scheduler for linux), when there was a
'family friendly' policy with no swearing. I assumed that the no swearing part
of that rule was more contextual, but it turned out to be a zero tolerance
policy.

------
barking
I've often read recommendations where people will something like 'Gimp is not
as user friendly but a fair alternative if you can't afford to drop the $$$
that Photoshop costs'. Having never used Photoshop I can't comment on how they
compare but this type of comment did make me feel nervous about using Gimp and
even probably negatively affected my progress in learning to use it. Now,
having used Gimp a reasonable amount I think it's about as easy to use as such
a feature rich program can be expected to be. Unfortunately because it's a
program that I don't use very often, there tends to be a lot forgotten each
time I return to it.

~~~
jiggy2011
I have the same problem, GIMP is not particularly intuitive. The other issue
is that it's possible to find thousands of tutorials online in how to do
pretty much anything in Photoshop, but not so much with GIMP.

GIMP needs to decide between trying to be a full photoshop replacement, or
deciding to worry less about features and make itself super intuitive for
graphics newbies.

------
mariusandra
For me, the only thing missing in GIMP to be a viable competitor with
Photoshop is support for layer styles.

I realize you can do almost all of the effects that Photoshop's layer styles
offer, with some workarounds in GIMP, but it's not the same. The easiness of
just ticking a few checkboxes, choosing either drop shadow or gradient
overlay, playing with the parameters and seeing the result real time... plus
then coming back to the dialog to tweak some parameters.... is so much better
than the gimp way (applying a filter, clicking undo, writing down what you had
in the filter in case you need to rerun it with slightly different parameters,
etc).

People without experience who wonder "What's the big deal? You can do all the
same things. Do you need some fancy interface to add bling-bling to your
images?" are missing the point. Making some of the more common operations as
easy and as that saves a ton of time for example when creating web sites. For
drop shadows in GIMP I have to move around two layers and re-run the filter if
I need to change some parameters of the shadow. In Photoshop I just click the
"put a drop shadow on this layer" checkbox. That's saving my time and letting
me focus on what's essential.

Before GIMP gets support for these layer styles, it is, in essence, a fancy
tool for cropping images. At least for me. Photoshop is used for the real
work.

Plus, the plugins to convert Photoshop layers to CSS are additional time
savers. For example CSS Hat: <http://csshat.com/> (I'm not affiliated).

------
makmanalp
[http://gimpmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Launch-
Br...](http://gimpmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Launch-
Brochure-v1-HD.png)

I hate to say this, but that doesn't look very well designed. Every
opportunity should be one to show how you _can_ create gorgeous designs with
the GIMP.

------
jiggy2011
I'm surprised somewhat that nobody has come up with a commercial alternative
to the GIMP.

Something that is low cost (compared with photoshop), it doesn't need all the
functionality of photoshop. It just needs enough functionality for the people
who say "I would switch to Linux but I want photoshop" , I imagine most of
these people are not using all the photoshop features anyway.

Something like a port of PixelMator could potentially make a killing on the
ubuntu app store.

~~~
cageface
Yeah all 10 of those Linux users that are used to paying for proprietary Linux
software will be stumbling over each other to buy it.

~~~
jiggy2011
I don't know, look at (for example) the excitement around the news of Steam
for Linux as well as stuff like Linux Humble bundle purchases. I think most
Linux users would welcome having polished commercial software available in
addition to open source software. Ubuntu seems to be betting on this for one.

The "Free as in Richard Stallman" crowd seem to be a minority of Linux users.

Assuming these people are paying for Photoshop on Windows , would they not
consider buying equivalent Linux software?

Not to mention that extra software in these areas can bring in a very
different category of users.

------
michaelbuddy
@mariusandra layer styles and smart objects are what I need for real work.

Gimp 2.8 is a big improvement though, for sure.

So, according to the articfle, if the magazine is complete and will be
digital, why not release it now instead of Fall. why make the world wait for a
periodical? For more ad space I suppose.

