this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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There are plenty of people who need a better editor than GIMP considering how long it's gone without a major refresh (this isn't a whinge it's been over a decade). For anyone that actually cares about their sanity there's Krita, that actually tries to build a program for professionals.
Edit: Let alone Krita can actually be used by schools, while GIMP isn't because of the name.
Holy shit, will people ever shut up about the name? The truth is that barely anyone actually gives a shit except FOSS zealots trying to come up with excuses for why GIMP wasn't successful (or those belonging to the anti-GIMP circlejerk that's surfaced as of late trying to come up with new nonsensical reasons to hate a random piece of FOSS). Outside of the English-speaking world, the amount of people who give a shit about GIMP's name is precisely zero and the word gimp is almost exclusively associated with the program. Even inside of the English-speaking world, I see GIMP used to refer to the program more often than for anything else. The amount of people actually who actually care about the name is negligible and the amount of brand recognition that would be lost from a rename would significantly outweigh the benefits of possibly having a couple more schools think about maybe starting to use GIMP.
And the truth is that as far as FOSS GUI programs are concerned, GIMP has been tremendously successful. It's easily among the most popular, alongside Blender, Firefox and LibreOffice. It is and always has been far more popular than Krita in both professional and non-professional contexts. I've seen it installed on the computers of both my secondary school and college, because it turns out school computer labs need image editors and they're not going to pay for Photoshop licenses.
But it hasn't been more successful than Photoshop. And Firefox hasn't been more successful than Chrome. And LibreOffice hasn't been more successful than MS Office. And Blender hasn't been more successful than Maya. And Godot hasn't been more successful than Unity. And I could go on. Because no single FOSS GUI program has achieved industry standard status. Though Blender has a pretty good shot at making it.
The only one that seems like a FOSS zealot here is you my friend...hope you learn how to be kinder to folks during conversations.
I actually think that it wouldn't take too many more people using GIMP for the name of the program to be considered the primary meaning of the word in English.
GIMP 3.0 should be out this year. If you're interested, you can already use some of the new features (like true non-destructive editing) by running the development version.
https://www.gimp.org/news/2024/02/21/gimp-2-99-18-released/
Oh thanks for the heads up, I wasn't aware! I'll have to check it out when it drops :)
No worries :) It's a big release and is gonna really bring GIMP up to date. I'm super excited about it!