prokoudine

I don't think it was due to limited resources.

GIMP development started in 1995. First version of Adobe Photoshop with adjustment layers was released a year later, in 1996. The notion just wasn't there.

> Most people simply have no time to watch 20 amateurish tutorials just to get basic things done.

There is this tutorial on YT right now: "How to Download and Install Adobe Photoshop CC 2021 Free Trial". It's got 755K views.

Do you really think your YT tutorials argument holds any water? :)

Ye gods, where do I even begin with this...

Vector layers was a 2006 Google Summer of Code project. It was too ambitious, it wasn't completed, whatever good bits were done got merged years later so that the code wouldn't be lost completely, and there is still no user interface for any of that.

But the sole reason this project was assigned was because people behind GIMP were quite open to having better drawing tools in the program. They just lacked the time and the motivation to work on that.

When your program is primarily intended for image manipulation and you have a crapton of requests from users to add image manipulation tools, filters, and whatnot, how else do you prioritize your work? Especially when you program's architecture turns out to be inadequate for complex features and you have to rearchitect and repurpose 800K LOC, not to mention updating it for the next generation of the UI toolkit that is a moving target of its own?

For every user complaining about not having shape tools you'll get three complaining about the UI, another two or three complaining about not having non-destructive editing, another two demanding layer styles, then an assorted group of individuals wanting CMYK image mode, LAB image mode, more use of GPU, AI features, more filters, better HiDPI support, and the list goes on. All the while you have essentially one person doing 50% of all work and a small team of people all working on small items. All the while there are free/libre applications like Inkscape that have been providing better drawing tools for years.

So I'll ask again: given all that, how else do you prioritize your work?

I wrote above that Photoshop 5.0 (which GIMP was compared against) did not have vector objects, Photoshop 6.0 was the first version to have it. I'm getting a feeling that you are talking about something else here.

Your analogy falls short for a very predictable reason. There are exactly zero paid developers in the GIMP project.

The right kind of an analogy would be an investor stumbling upon a tiny community of developers that has been serving hundreds of thousands of users for the past 25+ years without pay.

> The fact it’s been struggling to get widespread support for decades

There's hundreds of thousands downloads every month. I'm sure you have better facts at your disposal and will share them easily.

First off, the work is not complete yet. E.g. there is no CMYK image mode. You can open a CMYK image with automatic conversion to sRGB, you can also do a soft-proof, and you can export CMYK images (JPEG, TIFF, PSD). This part is comparatively cheap to do, but it needed some infrastructure in place and, above all, it needed someone to write the code.

The previous attempt to add CMYK exporting didn't go well. The developer implemented all that in a new set of plugins instead of building the functionality into existing code. This wouldn't work. The developer apparently wasn't interested to do it right or did not have the time, he wouldn't say.

So there's the architectural aspect of this and then there's availability of a contributor willing to hacks on this.

You can read a little more about this GSoC project here: https://www.gimp.org/news/2022/06/03/cmyk-in-gsoc-2022/

> the GIMP team has hard time questioning their UI choices

That seems to be a popular myth.

The cost is covered by Google Summer of Code program.

Are we talking about GIMP or Photoshop here? :)

> The UI is absolutely horrendous and despite decades of opportunity to fix it, there’s been zero attempt.

I'm afraid you are dismissing quite a lot of work to improve the UX/UI.

Could more be done? Absolutely! Was there zero attempt? Not really, no.

Vector shapes were added in 6.0.

Right off the bat:

> The Fuzzy Select tool in GIMP took about 20 seconds to decide what I had clicked on and isolate it for me

That's uncommon enough to be an isolated incident.

> Krita... has better extensibility

Really? How? :)

> My personal experience is that GIMP is not quite at feature parity with Photoshop 3 or 4. It's definitely nowhere near Photoshop 5

Layer Effects are the only 5.0 feature from Photoshop that GIMP doesn't yet have.

There's also a million things GIMP does better or does at all compared to all the versions of Photoshop you mentioned. I can give you examples or you can spare me the time and just admit you've seen Photoshop 3/4/5 so long ago that you don't quite remember what it was like :)

From talking to many users over many years I can tell you that there is about a 50/50 split between people who like the changes you mentioned and people who dislike them. Which is why 1) these changes are optional, 2) the team is planning to introduce a softer rollout of such changes giving people a first-start dialog to make a decision on new UI options (see e.g. Blender or, more recently, Inkscape).

GIMP has been supporting WebP natively since v2.10 release in April 2018.

Do you mean 2D-only CAD programs? Because you don't have to go 3D with SolveSpace, nor do you have to go 3D with CAD Sketcher for Blender (it uses a Python port of the SolveSpace's solver).

Yes, FreeCAD can export 2D. See https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Manual:Generating_2D_drawings

> He claimed to me that Mac is not a supported target of Inkscape

Unless I see a direct quote, I'm likely to suspect that what he actually said was along the lines of "We do not have developers using macOS, so we barely support that platform. Would you like to help us?".

> ...and then blocked me

I don't really know you at all, but I know Martin a little. He can take a punch, so blocking someone means he had serious reasons to be annoyed. OTOH, I'd rather not take sides here, that's between you and him.

I don't think that's how that conversation really went because Martin will be the first person to admit that Inkscape on macOS is problematic.

Case in point: https://twitter.com/realdoctormo/status/1514742125132455937

Noone wanted to use it in the first place :)

> I have a long list of thoughts but the simplest one was the fact that moving/rotating/scaling a layer is 3 different tools.

You might find that fact to be on the ageing side :) Unified Transform tool has been available for many years now. It's all three (and more) tools in one.

> The design space has been very rapidly moving towards online, live collaboration tools like Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, etc and FOSS just has no answer for this market.

Oh, but it does: https://penpot.app/

That's the focus of the second (upcoming) article :)

Minor correction: CLAP was not made by U-he, but by someone who works for Bitwig and maintains VST2 builds of U-he synths for Linux.

Schwaa has basic support of CLAP in Reaper at the very least in his own branch. I believe both Reaper and Bitwig devs are waiting for CLAP 1.0 to be announced to make all this official. Which is not too far away.

Oh, and you can probably scroll to 46:51 in that video I linked to.

You can hear/see Paul Davis talking about the history of Linux audio in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk2AMwc4e2k. It's a lengthy video though :)

> I've been trying to use GIMP for the past 10 years and still have no idea how to resize an image/canvas

The tool is right in the toolbox for interactive resizing, or Image > Scale Image for blunt numeric input.

> or where the heck the crop tool is.

Also right there in the toolbox.

Well, Blender has quite a lot of nested menus and semi-hidden features. It was, in fact, the first popular free/libre desktop application to gain command search. GIMP followed suit years ago, now there's an avalanche of applications joining in: Olive, Inkscape, Krita (still in a branch, AFAIK), LibreOffice etc.

It's possible to move some of the nested menus into the main window. But as soon as you go anywere near filters, all hell breaks loose :)

> They also made some mockups of what a redesign might look like, but as you might imagine it would also be quite a lot of work to implement it: https://github.com/glimpse-editor/glimpse-nx-design

One problem with those designs is that cramming the entire GIMP's menu into the hamburger menu on top right is likely to cause more problems than it solves.

This stuff sort of works in applications with a limited feature set, such as Akira UX. I don't think it can work well for GIMP.

It's possible to find a hybrid approach, but so far, I've only seen Siril doing that, and I'm not convinced.

Most of your comments were only possible because you are still using version 2.8 where you apparently never enabled optional (at the time) single-window mode, and also because you previously closed the Tool Options and Layers docks for some reason. Moreover, window layout is preserved across sessions just fine, as long as I can remember myself using GIMP, which is 22 years, plus I never saw a bug report like this before (and I saw LOTS). So it's your local bug.

So basically the vast majority of your problems with GIMP are self-inflicted, there's a local bug that only happens for you, and then there's the save/export separation that is, let's say, debatable.

Nevertheless, thank you for going into details.