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Comment by BaseballPhysics | Hacker News Reader

Man, who would've guessed I'd be tempted to flag a post about GIMP. The level of vitriol in these comments is truly impressive...

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There's an instinct for pre-emptive attacks on minority opinions from people who have gone with the crowd and experience some cognitive dissonance over it. There are a lot of people who think that they should be using the GIMP (for whatever reason), but of course found it easier to do what everyone else was doing, and have to justify that by attacking the software and the people who use it.

The reason definitely isn't because Photoshop is a great piece of software with a logical UI, because it's damn near a random UI filled with aging cruft, advertisements, and bizarre flows for doing simple things. Any affection for Photoshop is Stockholm Syndrome from spending 8 hours a day in it and getting periodic dopamine hits from puzzling out a riddle of how to do something in it that seemed like it would be simple.

If the GIMP had proper color management (and better non-destructive editing), I'd never touch Photoshop. That's the beauty of free software, though. Once that stuff is finalized and in, we'll have it forever. See, GIMP doesn't have the means to steal colors from work you've already done, and you don't have to rent it.

There’s also an instinct for preemptively defending and discarding any piece of criticism and attacking those with criticisms (no matter what it is) of being invalid.

The reason definitely isn’t because GIMP is a great piece of software with a logical UI, near a random UI filled with aging cruft, tutorials from 2004, and bizarre flows for doing simple things. Any affection for the GIMP is Stockholm Syndrome from spending 8 hours a day in it and getting periodic dopamine hits from puzzling out a riddle of how to do something in it that seemed like it would be simple.

Look, I respect and am appreciative of the work the GIMP team and community does. It's impressive and I've donated to them over the years, even though I have never enjoyed using the software. And Photoshop these days is often a mess, I'm not defending that.

But it is possible to appreciate that the GIMP exists and also be critical of its abysmal usability and the fact that it pales in comparison to not just other proprietary (but extremely affordable tools like Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, Acorn), but also other FOSS tools like Krita, Blender, and Inkscape, to say nothing of near-OSS tools like the excellent Paint.net. Some of this is down to the fact that making good software is hard, especially free software. But a lot of it comes down to a lack of solid direction and and insistence from the crowd that GIMP is every bit as good as Photoshop. It isn't. It never will be.

I'm glad the GIMP exists. You also couldn't pay me to use the GIMP.

Maybe just maybe the thread celebrating their 27th birthday isn't the time or place for shitting on them?

I wasn’t shitting on them. I was making fun of the poster above who used that language to dismiss anyone who doesn’t want to say glowing things about a piece of software.

>See, GIMP doesn't have the means to steal colors from work you've already done, and you don't have to rent it.

Yeah, because with GIMP, you can't use Pantone colors to begin with :)

I like and use GIMP, but the color issue is a misrepresentation. Mainly because I don't imagine that 99% of the Photoshop users ever touched the Pantone stuff.

Gimp team members, especially the person in charge of their publicity efforts, were notorious for finding any and all discussions about GIMP on the internet and telling people to go **** themselves should any improvements be suggested or any criticism uttered. Have you tried to raise a bug for them? I did and I saw dozens of others do it, only to end up lectured about how much of a deficient human beings we were for not getting the greatness of GIMP.

They have run a UX brainstorm and then threw out all of the input that has been provided to them in good faith by hundreds of people.

Than there's the case of team's stubborn insistence on not changing the name.

GIMP team has been an active participant in the state of affairs that leads to threads like these.

I don’t see all that much vitriol. I do see a lot of people who honestly don’t think the GIMP is very good, and that better (free and open source) alternatives exist. That’s not in and of itself vitriol.

I think some of us can be unduly sensitive to criticism of the GIMP, because it’s a long standing project we have all used at one time or another and may have fond memories of. But it’s no longer the only kid on the block, and it’s just not holding its own against new free projects. It’s mediocre, and it could be better. We’re not doing it any favours by refraining from fair critique.

Yeah, it really bummed me out too. People don't remember when there was literally nothing and having this free photo editor was a life saver. They also don't know how stupidly complex that kind of software is to write. Just a lot of sneering, and not from anyone whose done anything worth a damn based on a cursory examination of their accounts.

I was hoping to read a ton of posts about good memories, or thanks, to the project but I wish I hadn't opened it now.

I dunno, I mean look what every GIMP alternative has achieved in a fraction of the timeframe.

Starting to think this “you should be happy and eat this rotten morsel because otherwise you’d have nothing” ideology is toxic and harms actual good technology being built.

Even the Blender team managed to drop the “submit a patch” attitude and actually turn one of the most convoluted pieces of creative software ever made into the defacto for the next generation through actually listening and responding to users.

Think of the good that could have been done in the software world if a different team with an attitude of building for their users had decided to build a free image editor 27 years ago.

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