this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
646 points (99.5% liked)

Open Source

34645 readers
1079 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] TheWilliamist@lemmy.world 8 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 points 16 minutes ago

Money link donate now you!

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

God forbid people offer feedback.

[–] TBi@lemmy.world 5 points 1 hour ago

Helpful Feedback is fine. As the OP said there is no need for disparaging feedback.

[–] mtchristo@lemm.ee 19 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Nalivai@lemmy.world 1 points 14 minutes ago

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

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] menemen@lemmy.ml 2 points 42 minutes ago

This is exactly the problem they face. I use GIMP since ~15years. Any change they make will annoy me to a degree. But I also understand that getting into the UI is not that easy. They somehow have to manage these two completly opposing interests.

[–] ManaOatbun@jlai.lu 43 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

I opened it, changed brush, got a segmentation fault crash lmao

[–] iamkindasomeone@feddit.org 5 points 4 hours ago

It's always the user's fault. Why do think you could change the brush using an UI element!?

[–] RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world 14 points 6 hours ago

Isn't C just wonderful?

[–] Leeuk@feddit.uk 17 points 7 hours ago

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?

[–] sfu@lemm.ee 11 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] JacksonLamb@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

If it's non destructive now I might try to learn it.

[–] joshfaulkner@lemmy.world 28 points 9 hours ago
[–] xnx@slrpnk.net 67 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

zero screenshots on the announcement page and zero screenshots on the homepage. Exactly what i expect from gimp lol

[–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 27 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] xnx@slrpnk.net 32 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (3 children)

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

[–] Manalith@midwest.social 1 points 3 hours ago

My college taught us GIMP for anyone in the CIS program, but not the actual graphic design track.

[–] RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] mholiv@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Majestic@lemmy.ml 86 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

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.

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

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 155 points 18 hours ago (51 children)

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.

[–] menemen@lemmy.ml 2 points 36 minutes ago (1 children)

I mean, tastes are different, but I really did not like the photshop page design.

[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 1 points 14 minutes ago (1 children)

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.).

[–] menemen@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 minutes ago* (last edited 7 minutes ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 minutes ago

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?

[–] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

The photoshop page doesn't even have a download link.

0/10 would not download.

[–] Leeuk@feddit.uk 15 points 7 hours ago

Agree, however on clicking the photoshop link was first hit with 2 popups before I could see the page.

Unless 3.0 has solved it, the gimp has a steep UI problem and a learning curve such that mass appeal on the website would be inappropriate anyway. I love it but I love it because I've been using it my whole life and know it very well. Foss in general struggles with useability due to a lot of hard to overcome problems - mainly, that by the time someone is ready to contribute to any given foss project, they're already intimately familiar with its foibles and probably have strong opinions about what UX elements are sacred cows and should not be fixed.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] Nalivai@lemmy.world 1 points 2 minutes ago

The fuck are you talking about. It's available in all the repositories

[–] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 2 points 2 hours ago

compiling a program takes like 2 clicks dude

[–] Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip 9 points 7 hours ago

"They" most of the times is solo devs and you can't blame them for that. GIMP does have flatpak, appimages, etc.

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 47 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

Krita.org does a nice job of showing off their work and so does Blender

They're not flashy, but they definitely make me want to download them and check them out.

[–] anomnom@sh.itjust.works 1 points 24 minutes ago (1 children)

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.

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 1 points 22 minutes ago

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] piconaut@sh.itjust.works 36 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

I actually like the GIMP website homepage more than the one for photoshop.

Its simple and efficient. If I want to know more I would go to documentation or tutorials.

The photoshop site just looks like a random squarespace template with a bunch of stock photos.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (43 replies)
[–] DioEgizio@lemm.ee 45 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

So in the end we got gimp 3 before GTA 6

[–] tauren@lemm.ee 10 points 7 hours ago

We got gimp 3 before half life 3.

load more comments
view more: next ›