Most of the comments here talk about the GIMP UX. Fair point, but misses the article entirely.
> [Øyvind] is the maintainer of GEGL and babl, the color engines of GIMP. His work was instrumental in (among many other things) the long-waited non-destructive filters implemented in GIMP 3.0
The interview is about Pippin's background (fine arts) and current (as of the time of the interview) work, and in some details about the graphics engine underneath GIMP (GEGL).
FWIW, it doesn't touch on the UI/UX side at all. So even you Photoshop lovers may find it interesting :)
I love gimp, it is the only “heavyweight” image editor I ever learned to use, and that choice has saved me so much money in software subscriptions! Thankyou maintainers!
I love the contrast between this and one of the next comments:
>In my honest opinion, GIMP is a horrific piece of software.
Both are absolutely true!
GIMP has been, for many years, the best free graphics software available. At the same time, it's so horribly anti-user (and anti-usability) that if it wasn't free software, the company behind it would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.
"Anti-user' and "anti-usability" are far too harsh. Outdated, yes. A product of 1990s-era UX design, absolutely. But every changelog has some mention of a UX improvement, and actually using the product at version 3.0 is, dare I say, pretty enjoyable once you unlearn things and pretend it's Photoshop 6.0. Single-window mode by default helps a ton.
I have used far worse software from commercial outfits. You would not believe how much aerospace and specialized CAD stuff still uses Motif and doesn't support scroll wheels or extra mouse buttons.
I think that the weakness doesn't lie within GIMP itself.
Imagine that you are a car hobbyist. You know your way around a wrench.
But then you step in to an F1 garage or even your local repair shop run by that one guy who inheritted his father's shop in the 50s and has thrown a tool away since the Reagan administration.
It's going to be possible for you to do everything that you know how to do, and even to learn some things along the way, but you're not going to be anywhere near as efficient as you were in your garage where the only tools you have are the ones you regularly use and you know the locations (perhaps roughly) of everything.
The same could be applied across any number of domains. Knowing your way around and ambulance isn't going to go as far as you might think it would in a surgical suite.
Knowing some python isn't going to get your pulls accepted in Canonical, Debian, etc.
Knowing your professors preffered citation methodology isn't going to gaurantee academically succesful searching of The Library of Congress or even the New York Public Library.
etc etc etc
GIMP represents nearly the totality of knowledge relating to image manipulation, and you can lay it out to perfectly match your personal knowledge and workflow, but it simply is not possible to have it automatically laid out to perfectly match everyone's workflow.
Could it be more intuitive? Perhaps, but moving things around now is liable to break the workflows of tens of thousands who have learned to use and love GIMP the way that it currently is.
For instance, having only ever used GIMP as my primary image manipulation tool, I can and do have some of the same complaints against [insert other software] that people routinely level against GIMP. The last time I tried to use Photoshop I spent more time in tutorials and help pages than doing actual image editting because Photoshop is as unfamiliar to me as GIMP is to a Photoshop user.
I started with GIMP and still pull it up first before worrying about Photoshop. For me, the "fighting muscle memory" comes from "huh, GIMP does it like this..."
I think it might be muscle memory. I started using GIMP in 2005 or so before the single window mode, and my muscle memory is tailor-fit to it. It felt like an extension of myself.
With GIMP 3, there are a lot of improvements! But it also breaks my muscle memory a lot. GIMP 3 is objectively better, but I find myself opening 2.10 regularly.
"And it turns out there are a couple hundred people already who would like me to continue writing code and sharing it publicly and openly. That at least sustains me roughly on the level of unemployment benefits in European countries. And I hope that this will even slightly increase – I will not have a Silicon Valley level software developer salary, but I’ll have enough money to cover my expenses."
I don’t often do much with image editing, so GIMP has been perfectly adequate for me for decades. I’ve never rented a copy of Photoshop and don’t care about it.
I’ve noticed small but consistent improvements over the years. People who complain about the UX should just go use Photoshop. It’s fine. Layers work well, retouching and filters are easy. I don’t really understand the complaints.
I’m very glad GIMP exists, and I hope it continues to make FOSS haters cope and seethe for the next 50 years. Keep whining about the name please!
The people who want GIMP to change its name are the people who use GIMP, love GIMP, and have difficulties using GIMP in contexts like education or employment because of its name. It's a simple fact that the name "GIMP" caused problems. It's a shame.
But there's not much use in changing the name now, you can't get that lost time back. GIMP isn't the only FOSS image editor available anymore. There are myriad of Photoshop competitors in the subscription, freeware, and FOSS spaces.
I love GIMP and I'm still using it because I've got decades of muscle memory. But I also love Krita and if I need to edit something on a work computer, I'll just use that.
People who hate GIMP's name are not "FOSS haters". They just hate it when certain people in the FOSS community make the entire FOSS community look bad.
Here is a typical attempt to justify the name "GIMP", demanding that society change instead of admitting the name has obviously terrible meanings:
_c3ag>first thing that pops is a phrase of some biologist regards why evolution made plants green and not blue (physically, blue can absorb way more energy from the sun)... SPOILER: because makes the plantae organisms way more stable rather than performant (which opens up less windows for failings regards evolution). i use Gimp for digital collages, dead simple pixel-art and even composing a poem book for my beloved one! and that tool if it isn't perfect for the job, is probably about adjusting expectations ¶ why society can't re-signify a offensive word?
DonHopkins on Nov 12, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
Sorry, but the number of people who have seen Pulp Fiction, plus the number of people who know derogatory terms for disabled people, is much greater than the number of people who know technical biological terms of art.
If the GIMP developers really want to score an edgy rhetorical point about how society should get over its uptight wokeness and let them use any word they want whenever they want, and that's the hill they choose to die on, then how about they go all in, and try convincing society to re-signify the n-word by using it IN ALL UPPER CASE as the name of a hard-to-use paint program with an overly complex incomprehensible user interface for TempleOS, then come back to me after a few years and let me know how well that went.
At least the Blender developers finally listened to reason, admitted they made a mistake, and switched the left and right mouse button behavior, which wasn't nearly as offensive to as many people as "GIMP", whose name makes it kind of hard to evangelize around the school or office without coming off like a flaming MAGA asshole.
Donald Trump appears to mock a reporter's disability:
By stubbornly refusing to change the name, the Gimp developers have lost the right to whine and feel sorry for themselves about how unpopular it is and how nobody takes them seriously. Because in the intervening 25 years since 1998, 4chan and GamerGate and MAGA and Q-Anon and January 6 and Elon Musk have kind of spoiled the coolness and originality of that rebellious "edgelord" attitude.
If you have to explain to people, "I'm not really ableist, but I am simply participating in performance art to resignify a derogatory slang term for handicapped people or submissive S&M sex slaves as the name of a paint program!" you have already lost them.
On my Windows PC it takes GIMP 15 seconds to start and get into a state where I can edit. It loads palettes, initializes and what not, according to the splash screen text. That's too slow, so I never use it for quick image edits like crop, scale or color changes. But that in turn has the effect that I never learn the unusual UI. Which means that for more complex task I avoid it too. Other zero cost tools like the web based Photopea loads super fast and mimics the UI of leading image editing suites. It thus beats GIMP on both quick and easy tasks and more complex tasks.
If it started faster, you still probably would find it a bit unwieldy for crop scale and simple color changes. I wish it did those things better, but on the other hand it seems like it would be appropriate to have a simpler program for quick tasks as well.
And I say this as somebody who rather likes the gimp.
I see a huge problem with Latin alphabet (with or without modifications) being shared among different languages is that it is almost never transliterated from one such language to another (I think the Baltic and the Slavs may still be doing that), which can make foreign names look like something imagined by a low-key LLM. How am I supposed to say 'Andrzei Chrząszcz' or, for an easier one, say, 'Buôn Ma Thuột.'
Readit News
> [Øyvind] is the maintainer of GEGL and babl, the color engines of GIMP. His work was instrumental in (among many other things) the long-waited non-destructive filters implemented in GIMP 3.0
The interview is about Pippin's background (fine arts) and current (as of the time of the interview) work, and in some details about the graphics engine underneath GIMP (GEGL).
FWIW, it doesn't touch on the UI/UX side at all. So even you Photoshop lovers may find it interesting :)
>In my honest opinion, GIMP is a horrific piece of software.
Both are absolutely true!
GIMP has been, for many years, the best free graphics software available. At the same time, it's so horribly anti-user (and anti-usability) that if it wasn't free software, the company behind it would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.
I have used far worse software from commercial outfits. You would not believe how much aerospace and specialized CAD stuff still uses Motif and doesn't support scroll wheels or extra mouse buttons.
Imagine that you are a car hobbyist. You know your way around a wrench.
But then you step in to an F1 garage or even your local repair shop run by that one guy who inheritted his father's shop in the 50s and has thrown a tool away since the Reagan administration.
It's going to be possible for you to do everything that you know how to do, and even to learn some things along the way, but you're not going to be anywhere near as efficient as you were in your garage where the only tools you have are the ones you regularly use and you know the locations (perhaps roughly) of everything.
The same could be applied across any number of domains. Knowing your way around and ambulance isn't going to go as far as you might think it would in a surgical suite.
Knowing some python isn't going to get your pulls accepted in Canonical, Debian, etc.
Knowing your professors preffered citation methodology isn't going to gaurantee academically succesful searching of The Library of Congress or even the New York Public Library.
etc etc etc
GIMP represents nearly the totality of knowledge relating to image manipulation, and you can lay it out to perfectly match your personal knowledge and workflow, but it simply is not possible to have it automatically laid out to perfectly match everyone's workflow.
Could it be more intuitive? Perhaps, but moving things around now is liable to break the workflows of tens of thousands who have learned to use and love GIMP the way that it currently is.
For instance, having only ever used GIMP as my primary image manipulation tool, I can and do have some of the same complaints against [insert other software] that people routinely level against GIMP. The last time I tried to use Photoshop I spent more time in tutorials and help pages than doing actual image editting because Photoshop is as unfamiliar to me as GIMP is to a Photoshop user.
With GIMP 3, there are a lot of improvements! But it also breaks my muscle memory a lot. GIMP 3 is objectively better, but I find myself opening 2.10 regularly.
"And it turns out there are a couple hundred people already who would like me to continue writing code and sharing it publicly and openly. That at least sustains me roughly on the level of unemployment benefits in European countries. And I hope that this will even slightly increase – I will not have a Silicon Valley level software developer salary, but I’ll have enough money to cover my expenses."
I’ve noticed small but consistent improvements over the years. People who complain about the UX should just go use Photoshop. It’s fine. Layers work well, retouching and filters are easy. I don’t really understand the complaints.
I’m very glad GIMP exists, and I hope it continues to make FOSS haters cope and seethe for the next 50 years. Keep whining about the name please!
But there's not much use in changing the name now, you can't get that lost time back. GIMP isn't the only FOSS image editor available anymore. There are myriad of Photoshop competitors in the subscription, freeware, and FOSS spaces.
I love GIMP and I'm still using it because I've got decades of muscle memory. But I also love Krita and if I need to edit something on a work computer, I'll just use that.
Here is a typical attempt to justify the name "GIMP", demanding that society change instead of admitting the name has obviously terrible meanings:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38236618
_c3ag>first thing that pops is a phrase of some biologist regards why evolution made plants green and not blue (physically, blue can absorb way more energy from the sun)... SPOILER: because makes the plantae organisms way more stable rather than performant (which opens up less windows for failings regards evolution). i use Gimp for digital collages, dead simple pixel-art and even composing a poem book for my beloved one! and that tool if it isn't perfect for the job, is probably about adjusting expectations ¶ why society can't re-signify a offensive word?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237328
DonHopkins on Nov 12, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
Sorry, but the number of people who have seen Pulp Fiction, plus the number of people who know derogatory terms for disabled people, is much greater than the number of people who know technical biological terms of art.
If the GIMP developers really want to score an edgy rhetorical point about how society should get over its uptight wokeness and let them use any word they want whenever they want, and that's the hill they choose to die on, then how about they go all in, and try convincing society to re-signify the n-word by using it IN ALL UPPER CASE as the name of a hard-to-use paint program with an overly complex incomprehensible user interface for TempleOS, then come back to me after a few years and let me know how well that went.
Prejudice by Tim Minchin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw
At least the Blender developers finally listened to reason, admitted they made a mistake, and switched the left and right mouse button behavior, which wasn't nearly as offensive to as many people as "GIMP", whose name makes it kind of hard to evangelize around the school or office without coming off like a flaming MAGA asshole.
Donald Trump appears to mock a reporter's disability:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdLfkhxIH5Q
By stubbornly refusing to change the name, the Gimp developers have lost the right to whine and feel sorry for themselves about how unpopular it is and how nobody takes them seriously. Because in the intervening 25 years since 1998, 4chan and GamerGate and MAGA and Q-Anon and January 6 and Elon Musk have kind of spoiled the coolness and originality of that rebellious "edgelord" attitude.
If you have to explain to people, "I'm not really ableist, but I am simply participating in performance art to resignify a derogatory slang term for handicapped people or submissive S&M sex slaves as the name of a paint program!" you have already lost them.
And I say this as somebody who rather likes the gimp.
I am confused
> This interview took place on February 4th, 2017
Not really -- It invites speculation as to why they were not published for 9 years. And, are the words spoken a decade ago still valid?