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GIMP - GIMP 3.0 RC1 Released
(www.gimp.org)
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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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Haven't tried it for quite some time, but does it finally have a UI designed by and for human beings instead of Vogons?
No UI change. I personally like the UI, but if you dislike it, well its still the same. I really don't understand what problem with the UI you have...
I can't say I like it, but it's not that bad. Certainly no where near as bad as some of the clusterfuck chaotic crap that Microsoft inflict on us.
Eh, depends. Windows? Sure, it's highly inconsistent. Their console UIs? Waste of screen space. Office though? It's so far ahead of Libre Office, it's not even funny - and I'm saying this as someone who was using Open and Libre Office for decades. Both feel positively ancient by comparison and anything more complex than basic document formatting (which also works far better in MS Office) is a chore.
I prefer Libre Office myself, mainly because of the ribbon shit, but each to their own.
There is a project called photogimp. Witch tries to copy PS ui and it keybindings. Wait until a stable release of gimp 3.0 and they will update their fork with this release.
These kinds of conversions have been around for decades. They usually don't survive big version jumps.
Coming from RISC OS art programs, I found GIMP's UI perfectly intuitive. I had used PS for a few years after Acorn and before GIMP. It's just different UI paradigms.
Coming from Photoshop 6 (which came out in 2000), Gimp is still playing catch up with that ancient program in terms of basic usability.
To you. It fit me like a glove straight away. It just made sense to me. It's quite RISC OS like with the multiple windows thing. I used it first in about 1999 when flirting with Linux (CorelLinux) after Acorn and before Windows. Then switch about 2006 when where I was clamped down on pirate software at the workplace and bought PS for artists.
You have to admit though that your background is quite unusual. I would assume that there are far more people looking for a free alternative to Photoshop after having used Photoshop for a long time (especially in the wake of the switch to a subscription model, but even earlier when prices were increased) instead of coming from an OS and using tools written for an OS that even among techies are extremely niche.
My point is intuitive isn't the same for everyone.
GIMP doesn't come from a clone of PS. It has it's own history and its users are used to it as it is. Any change to be a PS clone isn't what it's existing users (and developers) want. Forks to do this have come and gone. Single window mode is all that came out of mainline GIMP to appeal to PS users. This is part of a thing with open source, it's not possible to force something on the developers. You have to fork, work hard, win people over and become the new main branch. GIMP mainline keeps winning those battles.
Edit: oh and I am totally a freak in my software background outside of British computer people my age.
Oh, absolutely. None of them have any momentum and suffer from 1) long-time Gimp users usually not caring 2) former or present Photoshop users (in the case of PS imitations) rarely hearing about them and 3) those that do being hesitant to commit to them due to both their often half-baked nature and what you said (and also no plugin support, which is one of those things that binds people to Adobe, often against their will).
Most open source projects are firmly in the hands of rather conservative people who are doing their thing and really don't care about what people think. I've seen it often enough. I'm essentially saying the same thing as you do, but less kindly. It at least partially explains why so many projects are suffering from severely outdated UI designs, both in good and bad ways. Maybe it's the lack of economic pressure and competition too, especially with programs like Gimp that aren't actually competing with commercial tools, even though some of them could if there was enough motivation.
You've piqued my curiosity though. Risc OS is one of few operating systems of note I've never actually tried (and I have tried some freaky stuff - remember BeOS?). Let's say I wanted to give it a go today (in a VM) would you recommend it and if you do, which of the two (Open or not) should I choose? What can you actually do with it today?
Blender used to get a lot of stick about it's UI, but it's now it's doing amazingly well. It seams to be freeing 3D from Autodesk.
GIMP seams to be going through a bit of a development phase and after GTK3 move is complete, other features will get the that development. It could be interesting few years.
As for trying RISC OS, no where is especially active to be honest. Though it can be run on Raspberry Pi. The big thing it still does best is save dialogs. Just drag into a file manager window. For the decades after leaving RISC OS I have to copy paste directory paths like a primitive! The ROX Linux desktop gives you a bit of a taste of it, but only ROX apps have the dialog magic. Last I run RISC OS was ArcEmu to play Bug Hunter 1 & 2. I did some open source work on RPCEmu to run games I made as a kid. I should run it again to show the kids what I was doing at their age!
There is one crucial difference between image editing software like Photshop and Gimp vs. 3D software suites like Maya and Blender: My hypothesis is (and feel free to pick this apart) that you can totally teach yourself to use the former rather competently without any outside help, not even documentation and tutorials, but I would argue that this is nearly impossible with the latter due to their far greater complexity. This in turn means that people will look up guides and tutorials and learn the idiosyncratic UI patterns that way, which is why Blender with its extremely nonstandard controls managed to gain a foothold far beyond the broke hobbyist sphere.
Thanks for gently letting me down on RISC OS. I guessed that there wasn't much going on with it, but I wanted to be sure.
Mmm I know what you are saying but I used to work with a lot of 3D game artists. All but a few hated Blender and said they found it counter-intuitive. But really it was that it wasn't just like 3DS Max and Maya (and it is a bit like Max to be honest). I'm delight over a decade later it's use has ballooned anyway.
During the same time in games, they switch all the non-2D artists to GIMP to save money. Every time I went into the animation room for something, I could hear "GIMP can't do X or Y" and every time I could show them how it could. They didn't want to try and were confused/cross it wasn't PS.