prokoudine

> basically harecoded to work with generic RGB

The days of that are numbered.

My problem with pie menus is that they imply circular reading. Blows up my brain, not in a good manner.

A few years ago a group of people (Glimpse NX) tried to reimagine GIMP's user interface with GTK3 technology like headerbars, but they didn't have a great solution for accessing all the features that are in GIMP's main menu. Turns out, there is a possible solution available in a new 3D CAD program called Dune 3D, as well as in an older program called Horizon EDA by the same developer.

That said, glad to see you working on the GTK4 port.

DPF is relatively popular

Windows VSTs require a Windows emulation layer.

For Mac VSTs and AU there is no (at least, no stable) emulation layer on Linux.

RTAS SDK is proprietary.

From the manual (https://manual.ardour.org/ardours-interface/the-toolbox/):

"Within this general behavior several variations are available as Ripple edit modes: [...] 3. Interview. This mode works just like the Selected mode with one exception: when you select a range and press Del, this will remove the selected portion of either audio or MIDI without shifting other clips to the left to match the freed space on the timeline. The main use case for this mode is editing interviews where you want the ripple behavior to edit out e.g. periods of silence, while being able to just delete e.g. an out-of-place noise or an exclamation by the interviewer."

> I just realized you're an Ardour developer

Nope, I'm a documentation/YT/social media monkey, if you want a real developer, PaulDavisThe1st is here for you :)

That is a really good point, thanks!

> Also on Linux it supports only rarely used plugin formats (LV2, Linux VST), for which there are little plugins.

Ardour used to have built-in support for Windows VST via WINE. It was so bad (as in unstable, unpredictable) it was disabled by default and was eventually removed. Yabridge is the usual recommendation to people who really want/need it.

> Is it some sort of standardized style guide for this kind of UI

Anything goes in this industry really :)

> However, I've found that this feature has been worsened a bit since v6

How exactly?

It really does not. SVG is not sRGB-only. You can embed an ICC profile that describe a CMYK-based color space and use colors available in that color space, in native CMYK markup, with sliders and stuff.

Yes, I've used it a lot on Ubuntu 22.10/23.04.

> I had no way to know if my images were all exported.

You had a way of knowing that though. When GIMP lists all the unsaved images, it specifically says which images have been exported and to what files. It does so by appending "(exported)" to the filename (just like in the window's title when you are editing) and mentioning the exported file in the second line.

What's your personal use for SolveSpace?

GIMP is not a registered trademark anywhere in the world. Unfortunately. Which made it possible for a number of scammers to be really bold (and be punished in the end, on one of the occasions).

Both Audacity and Ardour ping the server to ask whether a new version is available. Both applications allow disabling it. The difference between them in that sense is that Ardour does not (yet?) provide a way to easily submit a crash report — another common feature in software these days. How much of telemetry that is, is anyone's personal decision, I think.

> So, GIMP gets CMYK support, a basic image processing feature

Um, nope. CMYK is not basic. Rotation and scaling are basic. Gaussian blur is basic. Levels/Curves are basic. CMYK is advanced stuff.

> ...the author argues that GIMP is a competitor to Photoshop

It gets worse. He claims that OpenCascade, a 3D solids construction engine, is the alternative to AutoCAD, a 2D drafting program.

Python has been available as a scripting language in GIMP for over two decades now.

GIMP 2.99.x (future 3.0) is shipping with support for Python, Script-Fu, Lua, JavaScript, and Vala as languages for extensions.

Starting from scratch usually sounds like a great idea. You don't have to deal with legacies and workarounds, what's not to like about that? :) So I get it why people think it's best to start GIMP anew. I also get it why people are reluctant to do so. While you are working on something new, you also typically don't have a working program for years. And when they already have software that works, that means maintaining two code bases at once.

In case of GIMP, the existing team is already stretched thin and has to deal with too many reports and requests to handle. In the past 4 years, the amount of reports in the issue tracker more than doubled, but the team hasn't grown accordingly. I don't think it's realistic to expect that the team would be able to maintain the current code base while starting anew. If the current progress is already commonly referred to as glacial, what do you think will happen if they start reimplementing GIMP from scratch?

And I get it why you are referring to Photopea here. I think Photopea is a formidable effort. But it's been under development for 10 years already. That's quite a long time. And Ivan didn't have another image editor to maintain while working on that project. AFAIK, he originally intended the write a web app to merely open and show a PSD file in the browser. That's a quite different development trajectory.

> I mean, no professional uses Gimp for photo editing, at least I don't know anyone besides some hobbyist who rarely use photo editing, they might use Gimp. Or am I wrong ?

Check out https://www.rosiehardy.com/. Rosie is a commercially successful photographer who has been using GIMP for years.

> Insinuating "other developers are careless"

OMG, nope. The person in a parent thread asked a very specific question: what's tricky about CMYK support and why it didn't come earlier.

How can I answer that without explaining that CMYK exporting almost happened years before and saying what went wrong there?

Of course, it's your choice to think the worst of people.

> some of their maintainers have even been banned from twitter.

Are you referring to me?

There was some talk about making it possible to write plugins with Rust. Beyond that — no, I don't think so. I really hope not. If you start rewriting GIMP in Rust, you can pretty much kiss non-destructive editing goodbye. There will simply be no time for anything else.

> It has a lot of capability and works for your use case so that must mean it just works for everyone.

Must it mean that? Really? I had no idea! :)

> But you can't pretend Photoshop hasn't improved faster than GIMP.

That's not what I'm doing here :)

> There’s a certain section of open source devs who fight tooth-and-nail against better UX... GIMP is peak that attitude.

Except the GIMP team worked with a UX architect for several years. That's how you got single-window mode, convenient rectangular/ellipse selection and cropping tool, polygonal selection tool built into lasso, the unified transform tool, and more.

And even after Peter (the UX guy) departed, the team still made a bunch of UX improvements (and continues making them, time-permitting).

> Affinity Photo was made by a small team, so it’s clear it’s not manpower but attitude.

Serif Ltd. is 200 to 500 employees. They have paid developers working full time. They had the funds to start from scratch and build on their previous experience creating similar applications.

I'm not sure what you are implying or how we got from "why it was originally designed that way" to "still not available".

If you still want talking about notions and time, GEGL as the non-destructive backend for GIMP was started by Rhythm&Hues developers in early 2000.

We could have a long conversation about priorities and availability of developers and refactoring and all the reasons resulting in non-destructive editing not yet available, if you like.

> This just backs up the point the great grand parent comment made: GIMP just barely has feature parity with Photoshop 3 and even then lacks features that were in PS3.

CMYK image mode being pretty much the only missing feature from Photoshop 3.0?

I think people tend to forget all the hoops they had to jump through years ago.

Do you remember how you couldn't edit text layers until version 4.0 or 5.0?

Or how most filters and some selection tools didn't work in 32-bit mode until fairly far in the CS release series?

Just stating the fact. I'm fine with that. I still appreciate the effort.

GIMP is a huge code base primarily in C and GObject. This is not a popular combination.

The UI toolkit is GTK, it's not exemplarily maintained for operating systems other than Linux.

A lot of potential new stuff used to be held back by the lack of a complete GEGL port. I think the public perception is that it is still the case (it is not).

Long development cycles used to demotivate contributors. You could write a new cool feature, and most users wouldn't see it until 3-4 years later. This has been resolved as well. Since 2.10, stable releases get new features backported from the unstable branch.

Organizationally, there is no structure like a foundation in place to help financing development. It's being talked about in the project for the past few years, no action has been taken yet.