Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gualdrapo | Hacker News Reader

I hope they don't. As I see it the success of Krita was precisely that, being specifically targeted at digital painting.

Now, GIMP could be way better at what it does and I don't even think their biggest issue is their UI, as they have done some work on it. But for the recent interactions I had about it regarding some tweet from Snowden about GIMP on a somewhat recent thread on r/linux (nice place to have some decent discussion btw, I was banned from it), it seems not only devs don't have the funds, they don't want GIMP to be anymore successful. Like, I got a fair amount of vitriol just for mentioning that it was so weird that GIMP offers no tools to draw geometric shapes - you have to fill circular/rectangular selections to do so (!), when in pretty much every other image editor there are specific tools to draw rectangles, circles, ovals and the like.

View on HN

I found Gimp to be to be less than intuitive, but don't tell others that. The first reply is usually “it's a different, but not harder workflow, than Photoshop, and you'll get used to it.” I had never used Photoshop until last year, so didn't have the bias. Still found Photoshop much easier to pick up.

Gimp is still great, but there are choices I just don't get.

I was with you all the way, til you said:

  >Gimp is still great...

It's not. It's fucking shite. Just because it's free people seem to have this 'Emperor's New Clothes' mentality about it, where they have to convince themselves it's a worthy piece of software. It's not. It's awful and perpetuates the stereotype that free / OSS / Linux apps have to be inferior, clunky and unintuitive.

Applications like Krita, on the other hand, show that you can actually have free Linux software that can be as good [and as good looking] as the commercial 'pro' offerings.

I still wish they'd lose the hideous cutesy Manga splash screen imagery though [Similar is also used by Ibis Paint on Android [0]] as, for me anyway, it really undermines the "professional design software" message.

[0] https://ibispaint.com/?lang=en-US

Well, that's not going to happen :-). As long as Tyson Tan is prepared to create Kiki splash screens, we'll keep using them! You can start Krita with --no-splash if it really bothers you, though.

Gimp has a way to draw circles. You use the circle selection tool and then use the trace selection menu button which draws a line around the selected circle in your choice of brush.

Not that I care for drawing circles in GIMP, but that's two steps -- one of which I didn't know was even possible.

Sure, but this isn't exactly intuitive for new users - even those that have experience with others raster editing programs. The de facto expectation is that there is some dedicated facility for drawing shapes and lines.

I think it would be useful as a quiz to an adventure game, I would not pass that level without a cheat though

Disagreeing about design decisions is not the same as "not wanting the product to be any more successful"

We won't... We really like what we're doing, we like the artists we make Krita for and we've got so much more to do before we can beat Clip Studio (like fix our text shape!) that it'll keep us busy forever.

Gimp totally matches its name. From urban dictionary:

Gimp: a derrogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medicial problem that results in physical impairment. -- which is exactly what GIMP -- the OSS project -- is : a disabled, physically impaired image manipulation program.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com