- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- linux@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- linux@lemmy.world
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Man, after decades, why does GIMP still have a marketing problem?
Just visit https://www.gimp.org/ and compare it to https://www.adobe.com/ca/products/photoshop.html
Just assume both did exactly the same thing and cost the exact same amount (free or otherwise). Which would you choose based on their website?
Why does GIMP (and pretty much all FOSS) have to be so secretive about their product? Why no screenshots? Why not showcase the software on their website?
It’s so damn frustrating that every FOSS app appears to be command line software, or assumed that the user knows everything about it already.
Devs, you might have a killer piece of software, but screenshots go a long way to help with gaining interest and adoption.
Yeah, I never got into illustration or 3d art/animation, but I sure as hell know what Blender is!
It’s quite the testament that the Blender name is known to the masses (hope you don’t mind me calling you the masses)
The whole skateboard community thrives on it where I’m from, especially in this age of everyone wanting their own skate vid.
Wow. For editing purposes ?
Yeah! I got a couple of them into it when people came to me asking how I do my own edits, and from there it seemed to just be word of mouth.
Thankfully I helped the first through get the basics down and they then passed that knowledge on and so forth, so it’s worked out pretty well. A bunch of broke ass skaters will learn anything as long as it’s free, it’s why we spend most of our time falling.
How is Krita? I’m on a Mac and my biggest problem with Gimp and Inkscape has always been lack of MacOS integration. Mostly with the UI but even shortcuts were wrong when I tried it. And the mouse/trackpad gestures were the dealbreaker.
I use Pixelmator, which hopefully continues to be a well developed pay once app, even though Apple just bought them. That and Sketch get me all the design tools I need for 2D and web.
I don’t know about the Mac experience specifically but Krita was incredibly intuitive as someone who hasn’t touched creative software in about 15 years. I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago, doodled a little, then remembered I suck at digital drawing and closed without saving
Your first problem is you’re using a Mac. But beyond the obvious trolling, Krita excels at painting and is getting better at text as well -so far text tools have left to be desired but they’ve been working on a revamp for some years now, probably coming rather soon. What I find lacking as a daily user (I do illustration in Krita, animation in Blender) is the general image manipulation tools. Transforming, snapping, transform masks… are often either lacking in flexibility or poorly performing. I use Affinity Publisher on the side for compositing my illustrations with text for print or web, I wouldn’t be able to rely on just Krita for that. But for painting, it’s absolutely fantastic -performance wise, usability-wise, the shortcuts are so well thought out it’s a joy to use. It’s really made with painting in mind. If you like using filters, they have a good G’mic integration with hundreds of builtin filters. I can’t comment on their mac builds though, you’d have to try them yourself.
It’s more of a paint program, and it’s great if you have a pen and tablet. I haven’t tried out gimp for while, but it was more of a photoshop alternative at that time. I think Apple’s version of Krita would be Procreate, but Krita is free.
Open Source software is not a product that needs marketing.
The devs making Gimp gain literally nothing from you downloading and using it.
Stop applying capitalist logic to one of the few aspects of life that haven’t been monetized yet.Hey, you look interested in becoming a marketing volunteer for GIMP. While GIMP is not as competitive in marketing as the others, you can help them if you want. 😎
Gimp doesn’t have a marketing problem. Its well known its just that not many people like it. It is not a nice program to use. I think gimp3 fixes a lot of the janky ui but I’ll have to try it out again
Yeah, every time I have ever tried Gimp, attempting to do anything felt like someone had purposefully been contrarian and made every operation work in the hardest and most confusing way.
And someone may say, “well, you just have to learn it!” OK, sure. Or I can use something that makes much more sense from the jump like Affinity Photo. (Yes, I know you have to pay for it, but it’s worth it. Yes, I know not everyone has the money to do so.)
It is not a nice program to use.
Holy hell. I felt like that 20+ years ago when I started using it… I’m surprised that it never got better, from the sound of it.
dont forget how they expect you to compile it. some projects offer a nice .msi for windows, a .whatever for mac, and then linux users just get a link to their github. i mean cmon.
edit: i’m not talking specifically about gimp, my dudes.
That’s false, not sure why you would say that. Literally just visit the download page
i see what you did there
this can be solved by using a package manager. because thats what they expect.
I mean, tastes are different, but I really did not like the photshop page design.
Taste aside, you can easily see what features Photoshop has, rather than guessing, right?
I should have used a FOSS example, since Adobe is just bad in general (users saying the page has pop-ups, etc.).
All I see is “Ooooh look, we use AI!” which actually repels me quite a lot. The page leaves the impression that photoshop is a toy, not a tool.
Ok, let’s get off Adobe for a second… here’s a FOSS example: https://www.rawtherapee.com/
Easy to understand exactly what it does, screenshots are excellent. Surely, you can agree that this is better than how GIMP presents itself, right?
Great updated example and I look forward to hearing the arguments against this just like Adobe.
I mean, the name is a bigger problem than anyone seems to want to admit…
Majority of area in the world does not recognize it as negative thing.
Even for English, English itself is diverse language. Singaporean English, Indian English, Asian English, definitely not negative in all of them.
Forcing one standard of language as a universal is a bad precedent for language diversity.
Incredible. This is one of those hard to believe moments.
It’s been 21 years since the release of GIMP 2.0.
It’s been more than 10 years since work on a majorly overhauled GIMP 3.0 was announced and initiated.
And it’s been 7 years since the last major release (2.10).
I can’t wait for the non-destructive text effects. After all these years of dealing with the fact applying drop shadows meant the text couldn’t be edited, at last it’s no longer an issue.
Seems like a long time to wait for non-destructive drop shadows… most other art applications including Krita have had that for a very long time
As a long time - pre version 2 - gimp user my first thought was “what, don’t be ridiculous” and now I dont know what to feel. Why would you do this to me personally
To make sure to remind you to take your vitamins.
zero screenshots on the announcement page and zero screenshots on the homepage. Exactly what i expect from gimp lol
The UI looks the same lol
The layers are the big thing, but its hard to show because the final result looks the same anyways
Aw man i was hoping for a big ui upgrade like when blender released version 2.8 that now even cinema4d is copying.
I fear gimp truly doesnt care about its ui/ux because technically everything you want to do is possible as long as you learn the ways ans they dont care to attract an audience thats not die hard FOSS people. For example schools havent been able to use it because theyre so deadset on their nsfw name and schools cant have kids googling gimp with the pictures that will show up
I fear gimp truly doesnt care about its ui/ux
Why, because its been the single most requested change by the GIMP community for 20+ years and its the one thing they refuse to address?? Dont be silly, its not like the devs are acting like the guy who makes Filezilla who has been steadfastly refusing to implement a ‘dark’ feature simply because he does think anyone wants it… oh wait
What are you talking about dude, I search gimp and ZERO nsfw things show up.
No self-respecting UI designer would ever want to work on that dinosaur of a codebase. The GIMP team is simply unable to do what Blender did, even if they made the UI their number one priority.
I mean the whole point of doing the mega rewrite to gtk3 was specifically to enable such forward looking progress.
What they did in the 3.0 release was, largely, a massive modernization of a dinosaur code base.
Now that it’s done it makes sense to do a UI overhaul. Before 3.0 it made no sense to even try, now it does.
No, no, no. It’s the end of times. I can hear the trumpets of the apocalypse.
Now Valve needs to release half life 3 and the world as we know it will truly perish.
Jokes aside. I hope this means work on a UI overhaul can seriously begin.
Valve needs to release half life 3
Jokes aside Fresh leaks suggest Half-Life 3 development may be nearing completion .
Don’t you dare give me hope.
Edit: Holy shit. Orland actually says that exact line in the linked article. Kudos.
I want to contact them (Valve), and tell them that if they are planning of releasing a Half Life game, to name it Half Life 4. Just to troll the entire world.
Half Life 4: Episode 3.
The Orange Box 2; featuring Half Life 3, Team Fortress 3, and Portal 3.
Portal 3 would actually make hype, I love those games
And maybe WW3 too, why not. Complete package.
GTK 3 support just in time for GTK 4 & 5
I opened it, changed brush, got a segmentation fault crash lmao
Exact same thing happened to me. I opened it, read through the new welcome screen, and said ok let’s go! First move was to select a brush and it crashed.
Hey, it’s open source. Just open a C project from the 90s and fix it yourself. Ez /s
Nice. I wonder if they’d be open to rewriting portions in Rust to catch these types of issues with the compiler instead of the user. I’m willing to help if someone else gets the devs on board.
Is this what Rust is about? If so that’s a nice perk!
Yeah, pretty much. A segfault happens when you access memory incorrectly, and Rust is all about correct memory access.
Isn’t C just wonderful?
To all of the authors below who have disparaging opinions on the UX/UI experience and or the download ability. It’s a volunteer project for a reason. If you have such grand ideas and abilities put your money where your fingers are and fucking sign up.
A lot of the hate GIMP gets is people coming from Photoshop expecting it to work like Photoshop. In fact that’s true for a lot of Adobe-like open source projects. That’s why “industry standards” are dangerous and really only exist to keep one company rich.
My hate comes from wanting it to work like LView Pro. There’s no Linux image manipulation program that comes close to meeting the standard they set in 2001.
I think I remember that app? I’m going to have to go look that up. It’s shocking what one forgets in a quarter of a century.
It’s been tried. The gatekeeping of GIMP’s monstrously horrific UI/UX is both vicious and impenetrable.
God forbid people offer feedback.
Helpful Feedback is fine. As the OP said there is no need for disparaging feedback.
Declaring that the only legitimate feedback comes from people who are also capable of doing the work is not a good way to solicit constructive feedback.
No one said that though.
Right, and the initial sentence
To all of the authors below who have disparaging opinions on the UX/UI experience and or the download ability.
modifies the rest of the text
It’s a volunteer project for a reason. If you have such grand ideas and abilities put your money where your fingers are and fucking sign up.
Point being, feedback is welcome, disparaging opinions are not.
Nobody declared that “only legitimate feedback comes from people who are also capable of doing the work.”
Reading comprehension, my friend.
Hmm. So doubling down then.
So in the end we got gimp 3 before GTA 6
We got gimp 3 before half life 3.
We got Gimp 3 before The Winds of Winter.
Next. They should drop everything and solely focus on improving ux & ui . Every time I open gimp to try and get acclimated to it, I close it back out of frustration. Nothing is intuitive in that software. Not even the naming of the tools settings.
I followed some YouTube tutorial to rearrange all the stuff that can be to make it more like photoshop, which did make things somewhat better
To be honest, nothing is intuitive in any complex software. Every time I open Photoshop I want to cry in pain. But it isn’t because Photoshop is bad (that I don’t know actually), but because I am not familiar with it at all
Nothing is intuitive in that software.
UI/UX is a very very difficult job. I’ve only ever known a few UI/UX artists that were any good, and OMFG, are they expensive.
You can’t just drop everything and focus on something where you don’t have domain experts. Not to presume too much about you, but that would be like saying you need to drop everything you’re doing and focus on brain surgery next year. UI/UX is art. It’s a very specific type of art that, unfortunately, doesn’t come easy for people. There are companies for hire that work professionally on UX/UI, but they’re not cheap either. Anyone can spot bad UX, but knowing how to fix it in a way that works for everyone, that’s nearly a unicorn.
I’ve been using gimp since it was released for daily driver projects.
I’ve been using Photoshop for about a decade when required for gigs.
I can get around either app pretty decently at this point.
If you drop any new user into either, they’ll be absolutely lost.
If you drop a seasoned Photoshop user into GIMP, they’ll not only be lost but be unable to use their vast array of plugins and macros and aren’t quite (but non-technically are) impossible for the average user to work on.
We can’t make Gimp Photoshop-like. We can make strides to improve Gimp, but it’s beyond reach for the current team. Maybe we can start a crowdfund to get a UX company to take a stab at it, but even at that we’d need buy in from the developers and it would likely be an incredibly large rework, not unlike the current one that took quite a long time.
@rumba @mtchristo To gently disagree with you here: UI/UX work is absolutely not art, and in fact, this painting of the profession as some artsy fairy-dust non-technical creative magic is a big part of the reason why FLOSS projects have trouble attracting designers—they don’t respect their work.
UI/UX makes broad use of scientific evidence as to how people see, perceive, and interact with things around them. Conducting studies is literally part of the job at large companies, and those who do not have the budget rely on resources like reports from the Nielsen Norman Group to get up to date information on topics such as how people’s eyes scan a page, how content influences this, effectiveness / interaction rates of different design patterns, et cetera.
Unfortunately for the odd designer who does wind up in a discussion on a merge request on GitLab, their expertise is often treated as a difference of creative opinion by developers who know nothing about basic design principles such as gestalt psychology.
The problem of poor UX in FLOSS can’t be attributed to a lack of talent; the fact is that FLOSS projects are not hospitable environments for designers, both technically and culturally. For a start discussions happen on GitLab et al, platforms which are confusing to people who aren’t developers. And then, whereas if a non-technical user started arguing with devs on matters they don’t understand they’d be booted from the discussion, devs who clearly don’t have even basic design knowledge get carte blanche to debate against designers (on design, not technical feasibility), and their positions are treated as equally valid because they see design expertise as art—a subjective matter of mere opinion.
If FLOSS devs want usable interfaces (and I’m not convinced many of them do) this is the problem that needs to be solved.
To gently disagree with you here: UI/UX work is absolutely not art,
UI without art is just a bunch of shitty buttons no one wants to press. Come to think of it, that’s one of the problems with Gimp. There is a UI, it’s just not a good one.
UX is arguably design. But most design departments would place UX as a mixed discipline.
scientific evidence as to how people see, perceive, and interact with things around them.
You’re describing Usability. This is, in fact, its own discipline that should direct both UX and UI.
The problem of poor UX in FLOSS can’t be attributed to a lack of talent; the fact is that FLOSS projects are not hospitable environments for designers, both technically and culturally.
That’s just saying it’s a lack of talent because FOSS teams are inhospitable. Blanket statements like that ring as a stereotype.
their expertise is often treated as a difference of creative opinion by developers who know nothing about basic design principles
The consumers of the product know nothing about basic design principles either. Does their opinion not matter either?
If FLOSS devs want usable interfaces (and I’m not convinced many of them do) this is the problem that needs to be solved.
So, forgive me if I’m reading too much between the lines, but what you’re saying here is if FLOSS wants better UI, they need to engage someone who says they’re an accomplished UI artist and blindly execute their vision even against their own impressions of the requested work?
Maybe there are reasons the FLOSS devs don’t want to sign up for that?
UI without art is just a bunch of shitty buttons no one wants to press.
You’re describing Usability. This is, in fact, its own discipline that should direct both UX and UI.
Disagree. I do not believe that the design of a button is art. Even things like the roundness of the corners have justifications that relate to usability, which is an inherent part of design, and it always has been. Visual hierarchy is usability. Type selection is usability. Gestalt theory is usability. The hanging punctuation in medieval manuscripts is usability. UI, UX, usability: It’s all just design. In fact, if you’re a “designer” who is regularly putting out work that doesn’t meaningfully consider usability, you may well be an artist instead!
That’s just saying it’s a lack of talent because FOSS teams are inhospitable. Blanket statements like that ring as a stereotype.
This is a thought-terminating cliché, but thanks for demonstrating my point by flatly negating my personal experience as a designer who does volunteer for FLOSS projects from time to time.
The consumers of the product know nothing about basic design principles either. Does their opinion not matter either?
This is a strawman. My point was not that no one’s opinion but that of a designer matters. My point was that when designers are making recommendations based on their knowledge and experience that relate to design problems, the opinions of people who do not have expertise on these matters should not be treated with equal weight.
So, forgive me if I’m reading too much between the lines, but what you’re saying here is if FLOSS wants better UI, they need to engage someone who says they’re an accomplished UI artist and blindly execute their vision even against their own impressions of the requested work?
Yea, again, this is not what I’m saying. If a designer says “hey, we should probably put that button here for X and Y reasons,” devs should have the humility to understand that, as a design professional, they probably have a reason for saying so that goes beyond ‘I think it looks nicer.’ That’s the cultural component. The technical component is that FLOSS projects need to meet designers where they are and not ask them to use platforms they’re likely not familiar with in order to participate.
I agree to disagree, have a good one.
It is essential that you explain exactly what you find unintuitive, otherwise -forgive me, but- this feedback is worthless. Make a bullet list, with captures, show how you would rename or rearrange things. Do your part !
forgive me, but- this feedback is worthless
Its not useless when literally 99% of the people who tried GIMP Over the past 25+ years have had the exact same reaction, pretending its not a thing its whats useless
It is worthless, in fact. Because it’s not actionable. Read what the above user said again :
Every time I open gimp to try and get acclimated to it, I close it back out of frustration. Nothing is intuitive in that software. Not even the naming of the tools settings.
Nothing in here is specific enough to do anything about it. Imagine you’re a developer, and you read this. What do you do ?
As users, we may not be able to program stuff, but we can do so much design work. Making mockups takes some time but it’s within our reach. Let’s all contribute to the best of our ability. If all a user can say is “Nothing is intuitive”, then their feedback can only be dismissed. Because it’s not actionable.
Don’t touch my workflow. Just because you couldn’t get acclimated to it, doesn’t mean no one did.
Reminds me of this:
Source: https://xkcd.com/1172/
i mean its pretty good if you get used to it… i remember the shortcuts for all the major tools i use and it’s very quick and easy to use for me.
Now do VLC 4.0 :D
Brilliant and huge congrats to the amazing people who worked on it. One silly question though, is the “new” Gimp logo supposed to look out of focus or are my eyes getting old?
Not having non-destructive editing has kept me from using gimp. I tried but just couldn’t use it. I’ll have to try again.
If it’s non destructive now I might try to learn it.
It is.
GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) version 3 has been released. But when will Valve release Half-Life version 3? They have already released 1, 2, the episodes, and Alyx. But when will Valve release 3.0? This is not fair because even GIMP has reached version 3.0, but Valve’s Half-Life has not. 😔
I’ve only used GIMP a handful of times, so please forgive my ignorance – how does 3.0 compare to Krita or IbisPaint?
GIMP is generally geared towards photo-editing, so if you have an existing image, you can use GIMP quite well to e.g. cut out parts of it or to apply effects.
It’s not really geared towards digital painting or creating new images from scratch, like Krita and presumably IbisPaint are.
