GIMP initially started as an university project, that, by now, has been developed for almost 20 years. Just in the past seven days there've been 9305 LOC additions and 3535 deletions, according to the github mirror [0].
It's one of the most important projects for the open source desktop, for example GTK (formerly GIMP Toolkit) is one very important outcome.
Please support GIMP, because it's more than 'just' a Photoshop alternative.
> It's one of the most important projects for the open source desktop, for example GTK (formerly GIMP Toolkit) is one very important outcome.
Is it? GTK/Gnome was created over a historical footnote and to this day is more of a hindrance than helpful overall. It effectively bisected the entire Linux desktop community and caused so much time lost with downstream application developers.
GIMP is obtuse to use and provides an UX that has been out of touch for many years. It doesn't support features that are just bog-standard in other products, for years. (Like >8 bit colour). It is exactly the kind of amateurish project that gave FOSS GUIs their bad reputation.
Gimp is the only free alternative to photoshop that actually measures up feature wise. That its UI doesn't exactly mirror Adobe's isn't a negative. Many of Gimp's differences (key shortcuts to paste into a new image or drag and drop resizable select boxes, etc) are things that I never realized I wanted in an image editor until I made the switch.
It doesn't have to mirror Photoshop, but the UX has to be good. With Gimp, it's not. People can claim all they want that Gimp is fine (after getting used to using it), but there's a clear voice in the public that Gimp's UX is terrible.
I used to hear people complaining more about the UI before the single window mode became available. Nowadays I hear few complaints about the UI. That isn't to say it's perfect, but I get the impression people have other concerns now.
And yet here many of us are, satisfied with using it daily and supporting it. You would do well not to project your experiences and use cases on everybody else.
Satisfied doesn't mean things are great. People were satisfied with taxis until Uber came along and showed people a better way. There's always a better way!
I'm surprised at the commit rate considering how glacial the pace of development seems from a user perspective. Every stable release in the past five years has been strictly bugfixes.
This seems like a major development anti-pattern, especially considering their nightly builds are good enough to use. They need to get over their perfectionism and start putting out releases again.
Can you elaborate on that? With Photoshop being relatively cheap to use only when I need it, I have a hard time supporting an Open Source tool that never seems to meet my needs. What am I missing?
Photoshop, along with other Adobe software, now uses a subscription based model which users may not be able to justify, unless they're a student or professional constantly using it and recouping the cost.
Adobe also links all of your software and access to your data with a single account password which the company has proven incapable of managing securely.
So those are two good reasons to use Gimp - no recurring fees and no worries about the cloud. Although the best reason not to use Gimp, albeit an unfair one from Gimp's point of view (but still relevant,) is the degree of lock-in to proprietary Adobe formats and tools that pervades the graphics, editing and design professions.
>I have a hard time supporting an Open Source tool that never seems to meet my needs. What am I missing?
Simply having a decent, free alternative to Photoshop should be worth something.
> Adobe also links all of your software and access to your data with a single account password which the company has proven incapable of managing securely.
I’m not defending the Creative Cloud model, but you don’t have to save your data in the cloud. It’s just like how Apple has iCloud and Microsoft has OneDrive. Sure, you can save your data in the cloud, but you don’t have to.
I've met a good deal of digital artists that use GIMP exclusively - I think this is in part because Photoshop has always been out of many people's budgets and even more so since they've moved to a subscription-based service. Choices are then down to illegal copies or using open-source software, of which GIMP is generally considered the Photoshop competitor. If anything, I like the program because it brings such things to a much larger portion of the population than photoshop ever can with their price model.
It seems to have a larger learning curve and some things are add-ons, but a few things work differently or not as well. I think this is the main drawback, and probably what you are finding when you realize it doesn't seem to meet your needs. Most folks seem to get over this once the familiarity kicks in and they get the add-ons they need... well, added on. Additionally, GIMP can be used across platforms and this is really helpful to some folks. I don't know how it compares to Apple's artistic products as I've never used them.
I personally use Paint.net for light photo processing - mostly because I've used it for years. When I started, I needed a lightweight program to make simple things since I had a crappy computer. Of course, most of my needs are lightly editing photos of physical artwork and adding borders (because the borders look nice in the digital format). I keep GIMP installed on my computers, though, and my spouse uses GIMP for his digital work on his computers.
I think you are confusing ripping off someone's creation and stealing a tool used to create. Photoshop is no different from stealing paint, paper, paintbrushes, woodworking tools, pencils, pens, and so on. People might be able to tell what tool you used to create the work, but they won't be able to tell if the copy was legal, illegal, or if you used a borrowed computer - just like the physical tools.
Besides, not all the tools are good enough. Not everyone can buy tools. Hence the listing of the free tools, including the fairly common practice of having an illegal copy of photoshop (or other creative software). It is a commonly known issue to Adobe itself.
It's not my place to convince you to use GIMP. Either you do power stuff and Photoshop suits your needs better than GIMP, or you are not aware of GIMP's features (or you don't do power stuff).
However, I do want to point out that $120/year is not cheap.
For me, personally: I prefer not having to deal with WINE. GIMP is fairly powerful, even if it is a pain. It is the only alternative to Photoshop in the open source world. And 10 years ago, I would have said the only alternative, period. Many of the commercial alternatives were worse than GIMP.
Not trying to troll but what is the merit of an "open source desktop"?
Is it because said configuration typically consists of free of charge apps that it can be shared across anyone with a computer or is it about source transparency that makes you feel confident about what you are running?
Over the years, such importance lost priority for me when other closed source / paid (even under $50) alternatives are starting to mature and I can spare some money for apps if it increases my productivity.
In my case, source transparency and fitness of open source applications to the needs of my job.
I remember that when I could switch from Windows to Ubuntu in 2009 because I ended up using exactly the same apps there (except Putty, obviously, which I swapped with Gnome Terminal). I already had an open source desktop with the exception of the OS.
I'm using GIMP because Photoshop would be an overkill for what I do. Libreoffice is more than enough. Sometimes I do something very basic with Inkscape. All my work is basically browsers (open sourced), an editor (emacs), scripting languages (all open sourced). However I must admit that I have a closed source binary blob NVIDIA driver linked to my kernel.
The point is freedom and privacy, not saving 50 bucks here and there. Which is not available to everyone anyway, think high school kids and developing countries.
I rag on gimp all the time, yet I never end up buying photoshop, and it always gets the job done. We have a co-dependent love-hate relationship that will probably last all time.
I'm constantly shocked at how massive, important open source projects turn out to have so little funding. It's hard to tell which ones are Mozillas (super rich and sophisticated), and which are OpenSSL and Gimp (grossly underfunded working out of a bedroom). I imagined gimp being a 50 person team in an office.
I'm constantly shocked at how massive, important open source projects turn out to have so little funding. It's hard to tell which ones are Mozillas (super rich and sophisticated), and which are OpenSSL and Gimp (grossly underfunded working out of a bedroom). I imagined gimp being a 50 person team in an office.
It is shocking, especially because so much of all infrastructure depends on these projects, especially OpenBSD, GnuPG, OpenSSL, etc. I would absolutely pay for a 'subscription' where I could, say, spend 20 Euro per month and the money gets automatically spread over the open source programs/projects that I use. Things are heading in the right direction with Patreon, BountySource, et al. but I would like to sponsor on a amount-of-use basis.
Problem is no real reputable free software project (in order of rising significance) downloads, installs, or usage hours because most people that want liberated software also don't want tracking.
Also, different projects disclose their funding differently (if at all). Just in this context as an example Krita lists their monthly donations on their site but Gimp is just considered a part of GNOME - there is a Krita Foundation whereas Gimp donations go to the GNOME Foundation, so it would be hard given the Gnome Foundations budget statements to deduce what money is actually going to Gimp and what amount is coming in to Gimp.
Debian has popcon data, popcon is a default in Ubuntu I think too?
From the man page of popularity-contest:
The resulting statistic is available from the project home page http://popcon.debian.org/.
Normally, popularity-contest is run from a cron(8) job, /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest, which automatically submits the
results to Debian package maintainers (only once a week) according to the settings in /etc/popularity-contest.conf and
/usr/share/popularity-contest/default.conf.
one thing killing me, because credit cards are involved, with $1 it ends up with $0.35 + 2.7% + 5% fees. So for small monthly contribution of $1 developer gets $0.59...
there is clearly market for something more efficient...
Liberapay is a libre alternative for Patreon (with anonymous patrons and no reward) with much lower fees for bank transfer/automatic debit [1], as it is funded via donations
There's still money being lost; when you buy coins, and when the developer sells them. Unless they can pay their usual expenses using cryptocurrencies, they'll need to sell, at a loss (even if possible less than CC).
In practically any monetary transaction, there's some overhead and thus money being lost, (3rd parties involved, price volatility etc.) and so the question then becomes, how much money is being lost? Cryptocurrencies offer lower overhead in this regard, at least for now.
What about a system that holds X amount of donations in escrow until the amount hits a certain threshold, then releases the total amount in one actual (bank/payment processor) transfer. Might mean lower fees.
Such a service could also have a "release funds now" option for emergencies where you'd accept paying hiked-up fees.
A problem is that there is a limit on how long you can wait to make a credit card charge before your first verification charge expires. If that makes sense.
Basically there's no way to determine the card has 3 months of $1 on it when you want to make the charge and if you make it earlier you pay the fees.
GIMP only always remembers me how much I miss Paint.Net on my Mac. Just last week I had to do some image manipulation. Since pretty much all Paint derivatives for Mac suck hard, I preferred to spin up a Windows EC2 instance, install Paint.Net and get the job done, instead of using this UX clusterfuck named GIMP.
That's the one thing that has always bothered me about GIMP and I honestly don't find Photoshop to be all that much better. I had access to Corel Photopaint and Adobe Photoshop a decade ago and always preferred Corel over Adobe, the UI just seemed more intuitive. Then when Photoshop began to dominate, Corel transformed Photopaint into a me-too copy of Photoshop.
I have Photoshop on my work laptop and I use it mainly out of convenience but don't enjoy it. I have actually tried to get all assets as SVG and stay in Inkscape if at all possible.
Inkscape's UI isn't the best either , I'm not quite sure why I prefer it to Photoshop but I do.
So it's the same UI it's had for years. Just because it isn't modern and pretty doesn't mean it's a clusterfuck. I personally find Gimp easier to get started with than Photoshop, for one...
There have actually been some major improvements, notably single window mode. I believe they recently fixed the thing where the Tab key (Show / Hide Docks) does something unexpected if the last thing you clicked was a toolbox icon. These days it seems like the Gimp devs are a bit more tolerant of user feedback, which is one of the reasons I'll be making a small donation.
> Just because it isn't modern and pretty
The problem is not that it isn't modern and pretty.
The problems, at least for me, are stupid blockages that Gimp tends to put in the way of getting things done, eg. the layer boundaries thing, or the fact the font box keeps the focus after you've selected a font. If you need to work efficiently these things quickly add up to major annoyance.
If the benchmark is Paint maybe he means that GIMP is too complex for what he needs, so the UI is inevitably too complicated.
Pinta [1] is a simpler alternative to GIMP on Ubuntu. I never used it (and where is the source code?) but it looks similar to how I remember MS Paint. GP was asking about Macs, sorry I don't know anything about them.
I personally can't use GIMP for shit, but that is because I am used to photoshop.
In any case, the value of UX isn't just about how well experienced users can use it, it's also about how well new users can learn. Blaming a tool for skewing to far towards the experienced users is a valid form of criticism. Moreover, it is easy to have the skew without noticing. After all, developers likely move in circles with many more experienced users. There is also the potential blowback from experienced users to any kind of change.
On the Mac there is not particularly a shortage of good photo/image editors, from affordable to expensive. Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, Photoshop.
I’m not a professional and don’t want to learn Photoshop for ages. Also, oftentimes very basic ones are not sufficient, like most cheap ones from the AppStore. I haven’t found a proper substitute for this niche between super basic ones and Photoshop.
To put this into perspective EUR400 a month is about what 7 seats on Adobe cc would cost. I hope GIMP users can dig deep. Glad to see this story on the front page
And I would donate to GIMP development if I could fund specific feature development. In particular I want the move to GTK 3 completed, followed closely by moving to Wayland. Those are already project goals, but I'd want to influence the priority ;-)
Well I guess I'll be funding anyway, but I expect my argument for a deduction might be overturned, which if I could fund a feature it wouldn't be. Really all open source teams should consider this - not that people say I will fund X if you do Y but rather we intend to do A,B,C 'pay' towards the feature you want to prioritize.
Can someone explain to me why open source projects don't take on more 'sponsors'?
For example, one of my employers used to use the open source software Chronos. There is a lot of lacking GPU support in chronos, we opened up an issue and nobody wanted to tackle it, and in all honesty, if they had an easy way of getting the core contributors to be paid to add support they would have considered this.
Fast forward, they had a dedicated internal developer build out a very specific replacement for our needs.
Many* open source projects are ran by volunteers on their spare time. They do it for the fun of it, and often have a full time job already (possibly writing software, or not).
Doing sponsored development involves many activities besides coding, that volunteer contributors might not be particularly skilled at or even interested in learning/doing:
Bear in mind that open-source software was much more niche just 5-10 years ago. It was considerably less common for companies to make use of FOSS, understand it and be willing to invest in it.
Even the idea that it was possible to get paid for developing software that is given away to everyone for free was rather unorthodox.
Best practices in financially sustaining open-source projects are still developing, and I think we will see much more of it in the future.
It was considerably less common for companies to make use of FOSS, understand it and be willing to invest in it. Even the idea that it was possible to get paid for developing software that is given away to everyone for free was rather unorthodox.
To me it seems to be quite the opposite, from 1994 to 2004 or so it was very normal for people to drop 30-70 Euro on a Linux distribution (which were available in local book stores). I bought a lot of Slackware, Red Hat, SUSE, and FreeBSD boxes. Some of these distributors hired prominent members of various communities (X.org, kernel, KDE, etc.) to sponsor relevant projects.
After ~2004 this changed very rapidly. Probably because of: the availability of broadband Internet, Canonical giving away Ubuntu CDs for free, and the beginnings of the 'everything should be free'-culture boostrapped by Google Mail and other services.
The Software Freedom Concervancy actually does this as a service for projects, https://sfconservancy.org
But expect they still want the project to have a certain size
Both of your questions are answered in the short text. In the first paragraph he states that he is not the only developer and links a contributor list. Throughout the text he mentions funds would help purchase a new computer and help with his everyday bills (rent/food/etc.)
Fair question, it's a bit confusing because their patreon page focuses largely on ZeMarmot, an open source film. But it seems like the money will actually go to these people who also contribute to GIMP and other OSS, and who sound like they're currently in very poor financial shape. I contributed a modest monthly amount because it sounds like they do worthwhile things and could use a break, and also I would like GIMP to suck less.
tldr; This is not an official GIMP request for funding, but a request for funding by individuals who contribute to GIMP.
I love what GIMP is doing and it's a not very famous part of open source software. I'd definitely try to donate as soon as I have enough to support myself first :)
To put some figures to it, Debian's popcon [0] lists it as having 100k installs (out of 200k 'surveyed' systems). For comparison Steam has 6k installs in the same survey.
Steam claim to have 67M active monthly [1], and 0.6% linux users; ~40k linux users.
Guesstimation: if the 200k surveyed on Debian are representative and Steam installs is a representative sample then we can estimate that if the 6k installs of Steam represent half of the Steam surveyed Linux users that [3] ~300k people are using GIMP on Linux.
In the popcon survey a fifth of users are regular users.
On other OS users have a wider range of good alternatives IMO, but if we recall that Linux desktop usage is about 1-4% then we can expect of the order of millions of other GIMP users.
>It's been 20 years now without any success. Maybe it's time to move on?
A huge number of users is not what I'd call "without any success".
As I mentioned elsewhere, when I got serious into photoediting about 10 years ago, GIMP was the best alternative to Photoshop - better than any other commercial tool.
It's one of the most important projects for the open source desktop, for example GTK (formerly GIMP Toolkit) is one very important outcome.
Please support GIMP, because it's more than 'just' a Photoshop alternative.
[0]: https://github.com/GNOME/gimp/compare/master@%7B1507386622%7...