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A GIMP Guide, but from a Photoshop User
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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Krita is better and doesn't have a non-professional, ableist name.
Could you please explain what you mean by "professional ableist name"?
GIMP is a slur for people with disabilities, therefore it isn't a name many professional artists, nor those that care about ableism will like.
The program started off as IMP, Image Manipulation Program. They added a G (General) to make it a reference to a character in Pulp Fiction.
The name's history has nothing to do with ableism. Besides, not many artists care; look up what a "gimping machine" is :).
Words can have multiple meanings and context matters a lot. Besides its usage as a slur is pretty outmoded by now.
Well, it is still considered that by disabled people and that is who really matters in all this.
Until they drop the name, it'll continue being considered unprofessional and not in good standing with those of us who care about disabled people, especially if we are disabled ourselves.
Feel free to be offended I guess.
Thank you. I get that this can be problematic, but as a non english-native, I don't think it's that big of a deal. GIMP is a transnational project after all and as I understand they try their best to be (all)inclusive. Getting hung up on the very well established name and outright demanding (in another comment), seems a bit silly to me. Were it a more serious slur, one that may be more timely relevant, I would feel the same, but given what I just described, I don't feel that harsh about it.
Very hot take: I actually prefer it having that name, because it can lead to that term not being recognized as a slur by newer generations. When being asked "Whats a gimp?" they might then answer "An image processor.". Would eliminate a whole slur. And with time it might even go so out of fashion it gets eliminated from dictionaries. Instances of this exact phenomenon happening include, in developing order: Dude, Yankee, Nerd. Or if you want a devolvement: Bully, which used to mean sweetheart. Language is like that. Let the slur die.
That aside, I do not feel that Krita is better than GIMP technologically. I prefer both.
Perhaps when the time comes to fork the project we can avoid a slur as a name? That would be nice.
Are you yourself affected by this? Maybe I, as a non affected person, am misjudging.
Sadly this was already tried and the developers of the fork were abused and harassed as foss and tech obsessives hate being called out for things and folks solving the problem themselves.
What I meant by "when the time comes to fork, let's use another name" was not "let's fork it for the sole purpose of rebranding". For me a good reason to fork a project would be governance. "Hate forks", whatever the fuck that made up phrase may be, cause division, so I absolutely understand why people would be against this. That being said, malicious branding is more often than not connected to bad governance, so that would be interesting to find out.
This seems to be quite the nuanced issue, so this will be the last I said, but I would be hella interested to see some more viewpoints on this.
That wasn't the only thing they did, the legitimately wanted to fix a lot of problems with the GNU Imp too.
Nobody deserves harassment and abuse for changing the name of something.
You got the name of the fork? I'd be interested.
Glimpse
If they did change stuff technically whcih wouldn't be adressed otherwise, then I don't see a reason. Sounds like bad actors.
I did not even talk about harassment, that was you. But I agree, you shouldn't harass people for this. Does not change that I am against hate-forks, which this did sound like at first.
I don't understand what you mean here, could you please explain again?
Sorry, badly phrased. If they actually changed stuff technically in their fork, then I see no reason why you would criticize that. That is literally what a fork is for.
Yes, they did. Thanks for clarifying 🙂
I don't actually see that though, taken a look at their repo, they only seemed to remove branding and easter eggs to distance themselves from the GIMP project. They even went so far as to linger on versions and not merge features from GIMP, so they were actually behind. That would be what I mean by hate fork. Nothing technically good has been done with the repo.
Edit: I think they wanted to change the UI abit too for better accessibility, which would actually be a technical change for once, but other than that I don't see anything contributed to better software.
To be fair, they were not given enough time before the abuse and harassment happened.
If that didn't happen it is likely they would have changed and improved more.