As usual, whenever GIMP is involved, all we get are negative, often unfounded comments about an excellent piece of free software that is massively used and developed with very limited resources, doing its job really well.
There’s something so pleasant about having GIMP around, efficient and so far removed from the disgusting greed that drives so many of the projects featured here.
I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. GIMP is the perfect example of that and generally speaking UI/UX is the main symptom.
Blender was able to move forward by not listening to the FOSS crowd but to the industry. And see where are they now compared to GIMP.
important here to remember that Blender was created within the industry as a commercial tool. When open sourced the leader of the project remained and knew quite well what separated a good creative tool from a bad one. It was always situated in a position where the core users were either hobbyists or professionals.
Which brings us back to why so many people dislike Gimp, and/or see it as a posterchild example of bad FOSS alternatives.
I agree, and Culture IS important. And I think the culture around many Open Source "Alternatives" is harming themselves and the overall FOSS community. From Mastodon via Gimp to Nextcloud.
that would ideally be true, but it takes a lifetime for that to happen. (basically until all people who have experienced gimp as an insult are no longer alive)
I don't know what it has to do with anything - GIMP has been around for a while and has been the de facto FOSS alternative for photoshop for so long. That doesn't make that several of its UX and UI decisions are at least questionable nor make that comment you're replying any less true.
Not to mention the fact that if you ever mention in any way that GIMP's UX/UI could be better to anyone of its veteran devs they would turn weirdly ultra defensive and take everything personal.
I love that GIMP exists but... I have to say, it never got rid of the "backend developer doing frontend" feeling, and I've been aware of Gimp for 20 years now (did not know how to...ehem, run photoshop in my teens)
We added import support for most Photoshop palette formats (ACB, ACO, ASE), so you can use them in GIMP. I don't think we can directly include Pantone palettes in the install because of copyright issues, but if you already have them, they should work fine in GIMP (and if not, let us know so we can fix it!)
… and the sizes of their updates are usually impressive! Seems to be a big project that is managed well to keep a good pace and keep the community in the loop. (Although I don’t know much about their inner workings.)
Because I fail to see all the comments here as negative and unfounded.
(and my guess why there is often negativity towards GIMP, is because it was too often advertised as a adequate Photoshop replacement, which it is not, so people got disappointed with it)
Furthermore, it's free software. If people have a problem with it, they're free to show up and contribute, or fork if the community is really opposed to their ideas (they probably are for good reason, though).
I can guarantee that anyone turning up and contributing or forking this project will not lead to the outcome of a improved piece of software.
It will lead to someone with the insight on how to make actual material improvements frustrated and angry that they don't have the technical skill (or time) to grapple with a complex codebase, and the people with the technical skill working on the codebase dismiss people with actual knowledge in different domains.
"Patches welcome" is not any kind of welcome. It's basically a euphemism for "fuck off, I don't want to have a conversation to make something better, I just want to hack on Feature X".
This is an extraordinary and unsubstantiated claim, and in no way resembles anything I said, nor anything I want.
Development to improve software should be a conversation between skilled and knowledgeable workers across many domains. Without that, you don't get improvement, you get feature creep.
There is nothing wrong with a "conversation killer" in this instance. The original authors do not consider your desired changes important enough to spend their limited time on them. They owe you neither to implement it themselves nor a "conversation" to guide you through implementing and merging the changes. If you disagree you can either spend the time to get the necessary technical knowledge yourself or find (and possibly pay) a third party willing to do it for you. Giving clear answers about what the existing project members are willing or not willing to spend their time on is the opposite of feature creep. The idea that open source projects should somehow be obliged to humor anyone with "insight" is absurd, especially when it comes to topics like UX that are 99% subjective. That expectation is something you can have in a corporate structure where you (or someone you represent) employ those developers but not outside of that.
There's a lot of projection there. Among other misapprehensions, I never proposed the idea that open source projects should be "obliged" to "humour anyone with 'insight'".
That said, if you have any kind of project (open source or not), and someone with significant experience in a domain outside your own makes a suggestion of something that could be improved, then the progressive and constructive response is "tell me why I should think that. What value is there in making this change? How will it be better" which opens up a dialogue, instead of "Hey man, RTFM and start coding" which is alienating (but your position is that there's actually nothing wrong with this. It is wrong if your goal is to create quality software).
I do design work sometimes, and when someone tells me "it doesn't look right", whether it's technically perfect or not, it means it's wrong. They might not be able to explain, but I know it's wrong somehow, and it's my responsibility to fix it. I don't sit them down in front of the keyboard and say "Ok, wiseguy, you fix it. You might need to take some classes at art school though". And sometimes that person is a designer and they say "Well, this composition is unbalanced, but you could try shifting that element a little to the right" and I'd be dumber than Trump if I didn't try that.
The subjectivity thing is interesting though. UX is not 99% subjective, and I don't know how you arrived at that figure. Start with Fitts Law, which is a thing, and not subjective and is measurable. Lots of people have spent a lot of time quantifying this stuff. There's science to it, and, yes, there's an irrational "feelings" component to it, but you ignore either or both at your peril.
There’s something so pleasant about having GIMP around, efficient and so far removed from the disgusting greed that drives so many of the projects featured here.