The GIMP will never magically become software beloved by artists—not without radically changing its culture, and making the artists the ones who call the shots. The GIMP will remain what it has always set out to be: a tinkerer’s toolbox, more concerned with the purity of its software politics than with garnering a loyal userbase of photographers and designers.
But because everyone insisted to poise it as a viable Photoshop killer, Linux is left with an obvious hole in its software offering, a hole nobody managed to fill with their own challenger.
↫ Aria Salvatrice
Excellent article, and spot-on conclusion.
What a bunch of whining. First of all you can always fork GIMP and listen to the artists in your own fork if you feel that is the issue. Good luck. And second of all Photoshop and other solutions have roughly 40 million paying subscribers on where GIMP has a thousand people willing to donate something. So in the end i don’t know what some of you expect. Start donating more to GIMP and then you can expect more. For the level of support it receives it’s fantastic piece of software.
Geck,
And it already exists
One of the popular forks, “PhotoGIMP”
https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp
Though, it is not GIMP UI that holds photographers back, but the surrounding ecosystem. For example plugins, RAW input support, screen calibration (extremely important in professional work), a Lightroom alternative (which unfortunately does NOT exist, I tried very hard), and a way to synchronize across your devices (which is not an SD card, or USB drive)
Btw, this is an area Wayland is a major regression against X11. But long story…
The UI part is already (mostly) solved.
(Plugins, I emphasized, since one cannot under appreciate how much of a 3rd party ecosystem is around Adobe tooling. It is a double-edged sword of course. There is nothing stopping them to replicate your hard earned plugin in next Creative Cloud release)
This will always be a prime example where proprietary software is just better for the task at hand. Photo editing is just fundamentally better suited by paid programmers and a single boss calling the shots.
dark2,
I’d agree that Gimp isn’t for everyone and I don’t like it that much. However I’d push back against your generalization. It’s NOT the case that proprietary=good, FOSS=bad….when we enumerate all the possibilities we get a matrix:
Other tools like Krita have lots of fans. Wireshark is open source and best in class. I love blender. Being open source is a bonus. Likewise with proprietary software, sometimes good sometimes bad.
I think the biggest problem is that there is no good open source alternative and none of the “big players” offer their software for Linux (Adobe, DXO, Capture one, Affinity…). I paid for photo editing software for Windows and I would pay for linux version. But it just not possible.
There are many open source apps that are good enough or even better that their commercial alternatives. But for me the graphic/photo editing software is the biggest reason to keep Windows on my PC.
I despise Windoze, and have been using Linux since 1992. The only thing keeping me with the steaming pile of MS crap is Photoshop (actually just Photoshop Elements). I’ve tried, every few years, to replicate some of my photo edits in GIMP, and it just won’t cut it. A fairly simple editing session in PSE which takes about 15 minutes can take hours in GIMP, and I can’t even get close to a similar final result. Can’t wait for the day MS self-destructs and Adobe HAS to port PS and PSE to Linux. Won’t happen in my lifetime.
I don’t need to use it for much, but I concur, GIMP’s code is not well optimized. Much of it is single threaded. I also feel held back with traditional raster editing…I find that with other tools vector editing and non-linear editing work best for me. I would be fun to write a new modern version that’s fully GPU accelerated!
I don’t know what it’s written in, but for Adobe it’s probably more a business decision than a technical one.