I am far from shitting on GIMP. But truth to be told, it's not very pleasant user experience. And I feel like there are several fairly affordable and significantly better commercial alternatives to Photoshop.

There are better free alternatives too.

[1] https://krita.org/en/

and

[2] https://www.photopea.com/

to name but two.

The Gimp is dire software and needs taking out and shooting. It's one of those awful apps that people who know nothing about digital design always trot out whenever others bemoan the lack of Photoshop on Linux. A recommendation that does more harm than good, as anyone who's used Photoshop and gives The Gimp a spin will end up thinking "If that's the best Linux has to offer, Linux must be rubbish!"

Krita doesn't have feature parity with GIMP.

Given how difficult and unintuitive it is to use, I don't think Gimp has feature parity with itself.

I love Krita, but I use it for different things than I use GIMP for.

It's really not bad at all. I've yet to run into a task I couldn't complete with GIMP.

Affinity Photo. It's basically the same thing but a one-off payment of £50.

I've been looking for this comment.

Ever since they started offering the Windows version as well I've been using Affinity Photon exclusively. I'm not doing a whole lot of photo editing, but when I do, I don't want to bother with the awful user experience that GIMP provides. I'll gladly pay 50€ for a software like Affinity Photo that offers almost the same features as PS while also being able to work with a lot of Photoshop file formats

What else is interesting is that if you are willing to migrate to a tablet based workflow then you can get tools very, very close to par with the Adobe suite for less than $100 - and that's a one time buy, not a subscription. If you're not married to open source, of course.

Spend another hundred or so on an Apple pencil and some font licenses and you are flying.

yeah well that is basically my point. We can all keep paying Adobe or someone else or make sure GIMP has at least one person working on it full time and have legitimate chance of not needing Photoshop in the future.

My point was something else: happy to pay someone for commercial alternative to Photoshop, coz I'm never gonna pay one more dime to Adobe.

Same here. I've been using PS since version 4.0 and it has become an absolutely bloated nightmare. +the cloud, vendor lock-in, pricing and all that stuff.

>We can all keep paying Adobe or someone else or make sure GIMP has at least one person working on it full time and have legitimate chance of not needing Photoshop in the future.

FOSS is a free market. The mere fact that GIMP isn't meeting users' needs is supposed to result in competing, superior forks driving it out of business, not a desire to give more money to the incumbent.

Correction: that is how much they make WEEKLY on 'librapay'. That is not the only way they take money.

Not how much they get from other methods, like paypal and flattr. They also accept bitcoin, cheque via GNOME.

One of the devs runs a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pippin

GIMP also has sponsors, though I don't know how much they contribute: https://www.gimp.org/donating/sponsors.html

That still isn't much at all for a program trying to compete with Photoshop though.

Don't know why people hating on GIMP.. maybe it's not exact replacement for photoshop.. but I've used it for product photo touch-up work and it gets the job done. Which is great job for free

I agree. It's a good tool and gets the job done, and it's been a tool that I've reached for a long time.

It's unfortunate that their funding situation is so dire. It's a project that could use a cash injection like Blender got. Blender went from having a terrible UI to winning awards.

Blender already has a solid and enthousiastic user base before the 2.7 UI update.

Blender was also the forerunner in having a kickstarter-like scheme to raise enough money to make it opensource.

There's an interesting interview between Ton Roosendaal and Blender Guru about the history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg

The Blender guys were also a lot less hostile towards people trying to make improvements to stuff like UX.

One of the things that GIMP also desperately needs is a name change, while Blender is an odd choice it at least doesn't conjur up sexual images.

> One of the things that GIMP also desperately needs is a name change, while Blender is an odd choice it at least doesn't conjur up sexual images.

https://glimpse-editor.org

Tbh ever since the redid the UI, I don't really hate on it as much.

Yes it's what they deserve for ignoring usability forever.

Krita is where it's at.

I guess I should give Gimp team a shout out, bit frankly I've never used it the last 20 years.

I agree, for me it is hard to understand reasons behind it's state - level of stubbornness is almost irrational, it's like project maintainers took some kind of secret oath to never ever surrender and bow to those pesky users demands.

That’s unfortunate. Meanwhile the JavaScript framework Vue is bringing in the following and more from other ___location:

* Patreon, 15,873 per month - https://www.patreon.com/evanyou

I find it odd that a technology I could easily reproduce myself brings in so much money compared to a project that is so incredibly far beyond my capabilities.

This is wrong. The link says $68.34 per week, not per month.

Is liberapay the only funding venue for GIMP?

Individual devs seem to have their own patreon accounts but their income is still around few monthly Photoshop subscriptions.

GIMP is great for most tasks if you have used it for a while.

I started on 2.6 and I use 2.10 now.

Can I pay for GIMP training?

is there a way to donate crypto? im in the mood

This is not reddit:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Nah. On Reddit they'd have gone for the full '$68,34 too much'. You get a more subtle class of snark on HN.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.