I'd argue that GIMP reclaimed the word for a better meaning. Consider how the word lame has lost its derogatory impact. Googling "gimp" gives me only results about the program. Changing the name now would dilute decades of brand recognition and confuse users, especially those in non-English communities.
I think the sunk cost into branding is the right take here; my 2¢. Gimp is still niche, and will never be used the same way people say Photoshop when referring to any general photo editing. It will take quite a few more years of transient language and lots of success for that unrealistic outcome.
I use it almost daily in website content creation. Sure there are quirks, but it's a completely free image editor that can do nearly everything I need. No complaints from me.
I'm patiently waiting for resynthesizer to be ported. Then I will make the move to 3.0. I've used GIMP exclusively as my image editor for the past two decades and it has fulfilled my needs for web development. I really don't get all the gripe around it. It's one of the most valuable free programs on my PC. Sure, it does take time and possibly customization to get yourself a comfortable workflow. But once you get it down, you can do basically everything you need with keyboard shortcuts and blaze thru editing really quickly.
Thank you for that link! I've installed 3.0.0-RC3 and so far I'm pleased. I've noticed a few new behaviors like moving multiple layers now with shift instead of the previous layer link.
3.0 felt a little weird for the first day or two, but as someone who likewise has used Gimp mostly for web stuff for (almost) 20 years, I really like 3.0 compared to 2.x so far. Text is slightly more finicky but way more powerful, for instance.
You're laughing but when I worked on a search engine, it was a serious question which videos should we display if the search query is just "BBC".
The prudent approach prevailed for a hundred different reasons but online user metrics weren't one of them. Apparently people were not very fond of the British Broadcasting Corporation, especially outside of the angloshpere.
Why would it be? I can't think of a single meaning of BBC which translates to an insult. GIMP on the other hand has more than one meanings as an insult (not even an acronym).
Definitely came after the original BBC being established, and definitely is orders of magnitude less known than the sexual slang variant. So yeah, the Gimp comparison doesn't stand, at all.
Describing one’s … favourite desert? (HN is American so not sure we can say the word here) doesn’t constitute an insult - people say it all the time irl. But you’re also right that BBC wouldn’t be a good name for a design tool either.
Naming things is hard, someone should setup a focus group :)
Users will no longer have security updates from the actual makers, and the team that specializes and has built it is not able to touch the code (unless you use theirs)
I believe you may have the story confused. Please correct me if otherwise.
WordPress was the one who injected notices into everyone's dashboard. This started because the WP dashboard shows the blogs from wordpress.org, and then they published this post: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
The result was WP Engine removing the widget that shows wordpress.org blogs on their installs.
