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)
Lol, this is such an open source bro remark, I can only applaud you for it 😀
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.
Image manipulation in particular is proving proprietary software is better for it. Sure, Krita is much better than Gimp; but they’ll never have the finances to keep up with Adobe or other commercial software.
dark2,
The most widely used graphics software happens to be proprietary but that doesn’t mean that proprietary software is necessarily always going to be better the way you seem to be implying. There’s a logical difference between correlation and causation.
You’re right the corporations have loads of resources, but when you work for them you quickly learn that the bulk of the resources do not got towards improving the product.
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.
Not an artist so what I say may be taken with a shaker’s worth of salt, but I find both gimp’s and photoshop’s user interfaces equally obscure.
Looks to me like alternatives such as paint.net and pinta are gaining traction for very good reasons.
>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.
As a financial analyst, it’s the same problem with Excel. No, LibreOffice or OnlyOffice don’t even come close. It’s a problem of both features (e.g. OnlyOffice can’t even do datatables), compatibility (basic formatting like pattern fill are missing and both tend to render charts incorrectly unless they’re very simple), and UI (not just the half-baked ribbons in Calc – anyone who uses Excel a lot uses it without the mouse, but the keyboard shortcuts are different in LibreOffice and OnlyOffice).
The conclusion that Linux is left with an obvious hole in its software offering, is not wrong as such. But please be honest about it, it’s a small hole far from anything major.
The fact is Photoshop, is not a killer application. It’s a tool for a limited audience and fringe users. It however has mainstream name recognition, but it still does not change the fact.
Professionally, I have have had only one coworker actually using Photoshop, to do moc-ups of customer installations with branding and such. Probably been some users somewhere in different location at some of the bigger places. And I guess some of the advertising people hired one time or another may have used it. But it’s been quite uncommon.
As for in non work settings, not any as far as i know. But some friends may have had a licenses at some point years ago. When digital cameras started to appear, most I know used whatever was bundled with the camera or some freeware they got their hands on. And that did meet the needs, the image manipulation was limited to cropping and perhaps some basic brightening of to dark pictures. An red-eye removal by the most advances of us. And today, most people does whatever manipulation on their phones and whatever functionality is provided there.
The actual users for Photoshop are a limited number of professionals and some hobbyist.
Photoshop has enough mindshare that millions of people with absolutely trivial needs are conditioned to think they need photoshop, and are willing to pay for it (or in most cases pirate it) rather than look for a free alternative. For a lot of these people even mspaint would be sufficient for their needs, yet they think they need photoshop.
I always find it strange to attack such a truly powerful raster art program. I don’t ever use it for photo editing, so maybe I am not the right person to defend that particular feature. I have been using it as an extreme hobbyist for just over 25 years to create original artwork and have been really happy with the growth in every release. In fact I’m looking forward to the speculative brushes in the next stable release.
For a little bit of my background, I have worked with and on numerous mediums. In the early 80’s, while I was in first grade, I saw an artist that had lost there arms and I took it upon myself to learn how to do pointillism while holding my pen between my toes. In junior high I had been hired full time to help teach various things with ceramics and porcelain, and by high school most people thought I would become a comic book artist. Instead, I pursued a career in healthcare but I have never quit making art. In late 2000, while working on my thesis on antimicrobial resistance, my Windows ME crashed for the last time and I switched to Linux. Shortly thereafter I wanted to extend the Slick Icons on KDE and discovered GIMP.
These days I still use GIMP, along with Inkscape, every single week to create artwork. I am always checking out new features and I am excited by every release. Currently I run a non-profit to help the uninsured and under-insured, so my computers tend to be second-hand donations. I appreciate that GIMP can run on older hardware, doesn’t track me, and won’t be likely to implement some sort of AI that interferes with my own creativity. Oh, and it has a native Linux port.
The second thing that I find peculiar is the false assertion that professionals don’t use GIMP. I know a number of professional artists that rely on GIMP in their studios, offer classes and online tutorials, and seem to generally enjoy using GIMP. I know I have enjoyed the tutorials that Logos by Nick posts, and he is not the only one.
I’d welcome thoughtful dialogue about the strengths and limitations of GIMP and other open source art programs.
I spend some time looking on other posts of Aria Salvatrice, and there is some leading theme to them, it is to criticize various things more on political grounds than for example technical or from the usability perspective.
I also used early versions of GIMP at the beginning of 2000s, and I also can recall some details about how this project was developed and perceived in the community at that time and many statements found in Salvatrice’s article are just not true, or misleading.
I think the bigger issue for me is weak interoperability with vector and layout apps. Photoshop has Illustrator and InDesign, and the 3 of them work beautifully together with a shared UI paradigm.
I’m an industrial designer and former software developer that dailies Linux. Every single day I sketch in Krita and build in Blender. But, when I need to create a well-crafted document, I revert to Windows and Adobe Creative Cloud. GIMP/Inkscape/Scribus is a totally disjointed solution compared to CC. The user interfaces are very different (the hotkeys, the menu layouts, etc.). It’s confusing when you have to jump back and forth.
This illustrates the problem I have with many FOSS apps: they’re islands.
gtada,
I agree it would be nice to have a full suite of tools that all work together. Obviously the tools we have now are made by completely different teams, each with their own interfaces and frameworks. I don’t have anything to recommend for you 🙁 To get what you want, everyone would need to organize and work together, which can be a big hurdle.
Sometimes I give some thought to how I would build my own graphics software. My preference would be to go all in on the non-linear editing aspects even for photo editing. I quite dislike when raster programs (like gimp) force us to commit to choices early and if you want to make a change then all the subsequent actions need to be redone. Ideally it should be easy to integrate into various pipelines, work with photos, vectors, videos, 3d, photogrametry, etc. Also algorithms should be fully accelerated from the start. We’ve got plenty of open source projects doing all these things but you are right that they are islands and don’t integrate together. I’m not sure if we could create some kind of magic glue software to connect and manage these tools at a higher level than is currently possible. Sounds like a great opportunity!
I have some experience with integrating software that wasn’t designed to be integrated. I worked on the inkscape source code to add the ability to output laser projector graphics. I bought other laser projector software but found them to be inferior to editing vector graphics in inkscape. So I took on the challenge to add realtime laser projector output to inkscape. I did get a prototype working, however inkscape’s “plugin” capabilities are extremely basic so it required a fully custom build, which isn’t ideal. I don’t think hard coding laser projection into inkscape in the best approach, my need was pretty niche. I would like to see inkscape gain a generic API that laser projection software could hook into.
Anyway I’m getting off topic. I’m going to give more thought to your criticism and what it would take to actually fix it.
So my comment from yesterday that defended GIMP is still in moderation, but this throw away post with a spam link was approved. I love OS News, but sometimes I don’t understand why half the time when I write a post it doesn’t get approved.
SeanEParsons,
My posts get that a lot too. WordPress plugins are at fault. They fail to factor in obvious signals like “this is a long term account therefor is highly unlikely to be a link spammer.” or “this brand new account posting links is more likely to be a spammer”. Consequently our posts are just as likely as a spammer to be auto-moderated.
I’ve offered to help make improvements a few times but I gather that osnews doesn’t want to customize the website – everything off the shelf to minimize maintenance.
I agree with the conclusion, but I really think the author is putting way more stock in “if you build it, they will come”. Most Adobe simps simply are not interested in learning or trying anything else, even if someone magically came up with a killer ass photoshop alternative (FOSS or no). There could be a perfect replacement tomorrow by and for digital artists and a vast majority would still shit all over it because it’s not Photoshop. Just some of the worse users I’ve ever dealt with across nearly all jobs.
At a former job, the media dept bosses wanted pivoting some people from Photoshop’s stupid, expensive licensing to Affinity, where possible (the dept also used Canva heavily). Just the mention of not using Photoshop caused meltdowns and tantrums. Never mind that they weren’t forcing it on anyone and even committed to keeping around Photoshop when needed. They just wanted to trim down licensing if at all possible, and to their credit were really just asking for people to give it a good faith shot. To my knowledge, not one of their employees ever tried to see if Affinity could work for them. Zero interest. Zero curiosity. Zero drive. Just gnashing of teeth and screeching about “defacto standards!” and “muh workflows”!
It’s not just Photoshop. Same shit always happens with Acrobat which blows my mind in 2026. Apparently when you heavily use Adobe products it parasitizes your brain.
So yah, the conclusion that GIMP is never going to be A Thing? Spot on for many of those reasons. I just don’t think Photoshop will be overcome by anything else because it’s more of a cult than anything else.
drugajin,
I agree with all your points. Graphic designers don’t want to change their tools, which honestly I understand. Adobe’s counting on dominance and brand loyalty being more influential than protests over unpopular pricing and licensing. I have seen some designers boycott adobe because they pay for their own licenses. But in cases like yours where the employer is paying, employees are more likely to carry on demanding adobe software without regards to how egregious license terms become.
Adobe will keep exploiting this because it makes them tons of money. I’m sure it is cited as a success story in business classes. Everyone wants in on it and it’s why all the major companies have been focused on rent seeking subscriptions that we pay forever. Even for things like cars/printers/tvs… sure ostensibly consumers have to pay to “own” these things, but we’re loosing normal ownership rights. Companies increasingly retain control over our property and use their control for advertising and subscriptions.
This is greed at it’s finest /sarcasm.
GIMP is one of very few GNU applications. Not just GPL but actually GNU. And yes it is more politics than progress.
That said, with GIMP 3 finally out, GIMP is far more capable and progress has been much more steady and consistent. If they are able to advance CYMK and nondestructive editing just a bit more, we may see a GIMP golden age. For years, GIMP progress was hidden behind 2.99 releases with disabled features and fewer users. Those days are finally past.
Photo editing is not an artistic endeavour per se. Photoshop is a professional tool and professionals have some non negotiable needs. And for more casual users, GIMP is complex. Again though, both groups are seeing steady progress now in the GIMP 3.x releases.