Isn't that the beauty of OSS? People can fork projects for whatever reason they want to.
They are not at all hostile to GIMP--they encourage donating to the GIMP org--but I think their reasons for an alternative are sound:
Glimpse Image Editor is an optional alternative intended to assist users that are offended or made uncomfortable by the "gimp" name, and assist free software advocates that encounter barriers when they recommend the GNU Image Manipulation Program to friends, family, coworkers and employers.
However, Glimpse does have some other differences from GIMP which might interest you:
We also focus on making the software more "enterprise ready" so it is easier to modify and distribute for schools and workplaces. That means fewer "easter eggs", improved build and packaging tooling/documentation, backported fixes on a known-stable base we support for at least a year, and a more efficient Windows installer. We also plan to have a more predictable release cadence, as that will assist IT departments with their software deployment schedules.
> We also focus on making the software more "enterprise ready" so it is easier to modify and distribute for schools and workplaces. That means fewer "easter eggs",
Honestly, I don't understand how can people be so severely misguided. If one place would benefit greatly for easter eggs in free software is precisely a school.
But if they are backporting useful documentation, well, it's alright. There's nothing wrong with a fork, but the stated reasons are dumb.
> Honestly, I don't understand how can people be so severely misguided.
Sounds like a good description of school administration to me.
Creativity is critical to a good education, but it's also difficult to measure. Educators want to be able to show (to themselves and others) that they're being effective in a measurable way, so unless you're being creative in a specific and controlled fashion, it's a distraction.
> One of the aspects of Trustworthy Computing is that you can trust what's on your computer. Part of that means that there's absolutely NOTHING on your computer that isn't planned. If the manufacturer of the software that's on every desktop in your company can't stop their developers from sneaking undocumented features into the product (even features as relatively benign as an Easter Egg), how can you be sure that they've not snuck some other undocumented feature into the code.
If Gimp implementors had spent less time on "light-hearted and fun" and more on boring but actually important stuff like rendering text well, I might not have spent the last decade or so steering everyone I possibly can away from Gimp and toward Photoshop for professional work.
I took a chance on the Gimp because I believed in the cause - I wanted it to be a viable alternative to Photoshop. It very nearly cost my firm a contract big enough that losing it would probably have put us out of business - and would certainly have put me out of a job. Software that screws up that badly doesn't get a second chance.
> I took a chance on the Gimp ... It very nearly cost my firm a contract big enough that losing it would probably have put us out of business... Software that screws up that badly doesn't get a second chance.
I'll be 100% blunt and unpleasant here, OK?
You tried using this software in production without prior testing. And yet somehow the developers of that software are to blame? I'm afraid, this means that in the decade that passed since then you learned nothing.
Who said anything about a lack of prior testing? I hadn't used it with such a business-critical client before, but that's not the same as saying I hadn't used it before.
It's also not the same thing as saying I am, or then was, a fool. But your own uncharitable and erroneous assumptions are your concern, not mine, for all that they and others like them have long since ceased to surprise me in the context of criticizing a beloved FSF flagship product.
I mean, look, I get it, okay? You're a Gimp contributor [1], it's easy to feel attacked when somebody criticizes your work, especially when that work is very meaningful to you. But that's no excuse to deliberately mischaracterize what I've been saying, as you have done in this thread. If you think I'm wrong, you can find a way to say so that doesn't require also calling me incompetent.
As I said, I understand that it's easy to feel attacked when someone criticizes your work. But that's still no excuse to make it personal, the way you're doing here, or the way you have considerable prior form [2] for doing. It's not just that this sort of behavior on your part is rude and uncalled for, although it is also those things. Such behavior - and I'd think this would be important to you, even if simple courtesy evidently is not - gives an extremely poor representation of the same project you're trying to defend.
I'm not going to get any further into this with you, because there's clearly no point in doing so. Your mind is, by all the available evidence, extremely made up, and I don't come to Hacker News to be pointlessly insulted.
But, to briefly reiterate in parting what others have already said at length, you might consider changing your behavior, whether to maintain civility in discussions of this sort, or if you can't manage that, then simply to avoid engaging in them at all. What you're doing right now does neither the Gimp, nor its current and past contributors, any good at all.
You've just spent a lot of time writing this to refute my argument but all you really said is that I mischaracterized what you've been saying.
Well, nope, I did not. In this particular thread, you took literally zero responsibility for your decision. You blamed it all on software and developers.
Look, it's not a heavily guarded secret that GIMP is not great for certain workflows and tasks. It's not a big fucking secret. The text tool, in particular, would do with a rewrite (which might happen at some point, among gazillion other things). Literally everyone who tried it knows that.
It was your responsibility to pick the right tool for the job, and you messed up. So how about, instead of telling me to change my behavior, you start with yourself, step the hell up and start admitting your failures? Like a grown-up, you know.
Oh, and you'd make a great pair — Niccolo and you. It takes a special kind of a person to attack someone, shower him in expletives, then follow him around internet to tell everyone how bad that person is. You'd make great friends.
Okay, no, that's fair. You're absolutely right! I messed up. I made a mistake.
Specifically, I took the people who promote the Gimp at their word when they said it was, in every respect, a viable libre replacement for Photoshop. And I took the Gimp's ability to do trivial work acceptably, if without much comfort in the UI, as cause for confidence that it would do significantly complex work acceptably, as well. You're right, though. When quality of results really counted, I was wrong to rely on the Gimp.
Those claims of quality are still made on Gimp's behalf, maybe you know. RMS has been known to repeat them in public. It may interest you to hear that, when he and I had this same argument, I recall there being a great deal less swearing involved, and many fewer personal attacks. I have to admit, I don't really find those additions to be an improvement.
It's odd, though. By default, the claim is still that Gimp is a viable libre replacement for Photoshop. But as soon as someone happens to criticize some specific aspect of Gimp's functionality - in this case, its ongoing inability to render text at a level of quality comparable with Photoshop and with its commercial competitors more generally - suddenly "everybody knows" that that specific part of the Gimp isn't ready for prime time, never has been, and anyone would have to be a complete muppet to imagine it was intended for serious use.
I don't really know why that is. But, whatever the reason, it definitely doesn't incline me to feel differently about the software. I can't in good conscience recommend anyone use a tool that even its own strongest advocates so readily agree is so frequently unfit for purpose. That would be a worse mistake than to ever have thought the Gimp to be reliable in the first place.
> Specifically, I took the people who promote the Gimp at their word when they said it was, in every respect, a viable libre replacement for Photoshop.
You know what, this is where I completely agree with you. I'm very much against the idea of promoting GIMP as a Photoshop replacement because it will always lead to frustration. It cannot be otherwise. The software was never designed for that.
There are unavoidable similarities, some tools are specifically designed like Photoshop's ones simply because the way it's done in Photoshop makes sense for GIMP as well. But that is pretty much it.
> Those claims of quality are still made on Gimp's behalf, maybe you know. RMS has been known to repeat them in public.
I never heard RMS saying any such thing. But then again, how would I know? I don't follow him, I can't stand the guy.
> But as soon as someone happens to criticize some specific aspect of Gimp's functionality - in this case, its ongoing inability to render text at a level of quality comparable with Photoshop and with its commercial competitors more generally - suddenly "everybody knows" that that specific part of the Gimp isn't ready for prime time, never has been, and anyone would have to be a complete muppet to imagine it was intended for serious use.
I'm afraid you are conflating things here. So lemme unload a little.
Like every other software (incl. Photoshop), GIMP has loose ends, bad design decisions, etc. As a team member, I don't mind admitting it. Noone in the team minds publicly admitting it. There's no point arguing against obvious things.
So... Can you do serious work with GIMP? Yes, we've seen use cases of complex work. Commercial-grade work, shitload of layers etc.
Do you need workarounds? Depends on the project and the kind of manipulations involved.
Are there things impossible to do as compared to Photoshop? Yes, of course. All the 3D stuff, vector layers, smart objects are among the first things I can think of.
Are things getting better? Yes. Just two days ago I was talking to our guy who does a lot of work on performance. He has a test project file from a user. A real project, 500+ layers, over 1GB large. GIMP used to just crash on it. Now? No crashes, pretty much usable.
Would you be pleased if you tried again? I don't know, that is not up to me to decide.
I doubt I would, not least because most of my use cases for image editing these days revolve around photography, and FOSS library support for late-model Nikon raws just isn't where I need it to be. No shade on the devs and maintainers, it's a closed format and they have no support. But I still can't get the quality out of Darktable that I can from Lightroom, so I use Lightroom. (I'd miss my Loupedeck a lot, too.)
I did pull down the current Gimp yesterday to do a quick test of text rendering cases similar to the ones that it failed so badly on back a decade ago. The results were the same as I remember them: aliasing everywhere, illegible at small sizes even in very high-DPI files. If I had to guess, I'd think Gimp just always rasterizes text at 72dpi and then nearest-neighbors it up to match the file resolution, but that's just a guess based on the behavior I'm seeing; I haven't been into the code.
Granted, high-DPI displays were quite rare back in 2009-2010. Print workflows weren't, though. In 2020, displays >72dpi are rapidly becoming the default. Print still exists, too. Both of those are things you'd expect to see well supported in a tool whose homepage advertises it as suitable for photographers and graphic designers, among others.
Can't you just point to a concrete, specific problem with the Gimp (apart from its name, or the fact that it has a couple of easter eggs)? This is getting too abstract to be useful.
I can't find a specific criticism of the GIMP in any of your posts in this thread. Saying something is bad and not professional is in no way actionable. It's also very easy to disagree with.
Well, I suspect they build the thing to the degree they need the thing. I use GIMP for some stuff but I can't draw on it like I can draw on Krita, for instance. Pity it didn't work for you.
