GIMP 3.0 has a release schedule

https://librearts.org/2023/11/gimp-3-0-roadmap/

by pabs3 • 3 years ago

130 138 3 years ago

2Gkashmiri2• 3 years ago

i am not sure what i heard. i am sorry if the narrator is in this thread/reads this but i could not differentiate between the narration being made by a bad robot or someone stuttering. i tried to make out the difference between the two but simply couldn't

smt88• 3 years ago

I grew up speaking English in the US and didn't have trouble understanding him. The accent is thick, but it's understandable.

Anyway all of the content is also in the text of the page.

2Gkashmiri2• 3 years ago

no no. i understood everything normally. the sound felt weird thats all

wingerlang• 3 years ago

Uncanney valley probably comes from the sounds either being speech or complete 100% silence, dead space being cut out. I think it is understandable and clearly not a robot though.

hiccuphippo• 3 years ago

This is because that's one of the developers themselves and not some marketing team. I understood pretty well despite English not being my primary language.

prokoudine11• 3 years ago

I'm not a developer really, and I'm not part of the team for close to two years already :)

prokoudine11• 3 years ago

Oh, I'm probably bad, but definitely not a robot :) Bleep.

I think there's some distortion added by the Noise Repellent plugin, will look into tweaking settings.

archerx6• 3 years ago

A while back I was working on an indie game dev project and I wanted to see if I could do it without using Photoshop and in my naïveté I downloaded gimp expecting it to be an easy switch over. It was probably one of the most frustrating experiences in software in my life, I knew what I wanted to do but it seemed like gimp was going out of its way to make it as difficult and unintuitive as possible. I was literally getting angry in front of my computer which never happens.

My solution in the end was to download Krita, without using any tutorials I was able to figure it out and was working on assets and textures with very little friction.

Now days Photopea, a web based editor is much more useful and less frustrating than gimp.

I still think of gimp as one of the worst UX experiences in my life and it makes blenders interface seem amazing in comparison which is sad because blender too has an awful unintuitive interface that keeps getting “fixed”.

In the end, what the gimp team should focus on is the UX of gimp and make using it not feel like pulling teeth.

j1elo2• 3 years ago

Bear with me and take a breath :)

If you think with a cold head about it, do you believe the frustration came from the fact that Gimp has made actually bad choices about placement and design of its features? (tools, menus, options, etc...)

Or would you say it's just that they took a different path, not worse nor better, just wholly different, and that makes things more confusing for people who are used to, and have the different thing made by Photoshop, ingrained in their minds?

(btw your mention about Krita was very spot-on, because otherwise conversation usually ends up revolving about how Gimp is FOSS and thus they cannot afford having a full time designer working on the best possible UI... but in this case it seems clear that Krita has been better for you, while also being FOSS)

LadyCailin• 3 years ago

I learned photoshop from nothing a lot faster and easier than I learned Gimp. Paths for the same process aside, I think Gino absolutely could learn from photoshop when it comes to making things intuitive. Even if doing the task itself is done differently.

archerx6• 3 years ago

“ do you believe the frustration came from the fact that Gimp has made actually bad choices about placement and design of its features? (tools, menus, options, etc...)”

Yes, yes absolutely without a doubt because I can use photoshop, photopea, krita, paint.net and maybe Corel if ever use it again without issues. Gimps interface is objectively bad.

n6242• 3 years ago

As someone who's used gimp for more than 10 years because it covers all my needs without issues, and I can work reasonable efficiently because I've already memorised its UI and quirks...

Yes, the frustration most people have is because Gimp has made actually bad choices about placement and design of its features, not just that they took a different path.

At this point I've got muscle memory for many things, but I still sometimes find myself frustrated about the UI being so bad.

raincole4• 3 years ago

If you think with a cold head about it, do you believe the frustration came from the fact that Gimp has made actually bad choices about placement and design of its features? (tools, menus, options, etc...)

Not the GP.

GIMP was my first image editor (granted it was almost a decade ago so it might be much better today). And the answer is yes. Yes a thousand times.

Once I switched to CSP+PS (later Krita+PS) it's quite hard to imagine going back to GIMP.

LysPJ• 3 years ago

I've been using GIMP for well over a decade, and the UI still deeply frustrating.

When I see what Blender has achieved over that time, I wish GIMP could have done the same.

tauntz• 3 years ago

I'm in need of photo/image editing rather rarely. I used to pay for Photoshop years ago but I' was a total beginner with it and since I use it for 15 minutes per month, I can't justify the cost of a monthly subscription.

My needs are rather basic: 1) work related: combine some screenshots, crop some part of them, add arrows and text, add a rectangle here or there, get the pixel value of a specific part of the image etc. 2) personal usage: basic photo tuning (fiddle with contrast/sharpness/color balance) or doing some weird mashups of different pictures (cut out stuff from one image and add to another, add some layers, draw some pixel here, remove some from there..)

I've tried various different free alternatives and while other have their quirks and pros and cons, I can honestly say that gimp is _by far_ the worst in terms of UX. It's not even a single thing that I can point out that's the cause for this. It's a combination of many things. Unintuitive placement of features, simple actions that require a huge number of clicks and steps to complete, extremely slow vs every other app (on a M1 laptop), cumbersome UI controls, unexpected side-effects of performing some UI actions etc. If I would draw the usability of various apps on a graph, then every other app I've tried would be clustered together somewhere at one side of the axis and gimp would be on the other side, alone. The magnitude of the UX clumsiness is just so huge compared to everything else :(

jwells89• 3 years ago

There are some legitimately questionable design decisions in GIMP’s UI.

One of my favorite is the layer palette which contains what looks like a bog standard list/table widget like a user has encountered countless time across desktop platforms and software since the 90s.

That illusion breaks when you try to use it as a bog standard list widget — no, you can’t multi-select with Shift and drag the selection around, GIMP has its own unique process for that for no good reason.

Things like that will cause friction even for users who aren’t coming from Photoshop, being different from established desktop UI conventions.

Arainach• 3 years ago

I not only believe that (and I first used GIMP more than 2 decade agos), I believe that the entire project has a culture that is proud of being crude and inaccessible that is shown most strongly not by their bad UX but the fact that they still haven't changed the awful name.

The entire project gives intense vibes of "we don't care what you think" that have made it the poster child for many of the worst parts of OSS for a long time.

timvdalen• 3 years ago

I think it's just what you're used to. I mainly work with GIMP, but have to switch to Photoshop for CMYK every once in a while. For me using Photoshop feels like pulling teeth: everything is hidden, I can't find tools to do what I want, and the tools I can find work unintuitively.

Ferret7446• 3 years ago

Same, I grew up on GIMP and it works great. Tried Photoshop and it was painful. I've had similar experiences with all complex GUI suites, like DAWs and IDEs, each one is different.

archerx6• 3 years ago

Photoshop was not my first image editing program. I used to use Corel back in the day and moved to PS when it became industry standard. Unfortunately I think gimp baby duck syndrome (the is an argument gimp users like to use against other without irony) because why can I jump between a handful of image editors without issue except gimp? Gimp is the odd one out unfortunately.

oblio10• 3 years ago

I think it's just what you're used to.

If most of the mainstream programs work the same way, there's an age old set of UI/UX axioms for developers of competitor programs:

1. The users aren't wrong, <<you are wrong>>.

2. If you think you aren't wrong, <<you're still most likely wrong>>.

3. And if you still think aren't most likely wrong, <<show me your usability studies>>.

Open source programs basically have 0 usability studies because they don't have money for them, so this argument basically dies at step 4:

4. <<Shut the f** up user, I'm giving this away for free>>.

:-)

wccrawford• 3 years ago

I went from Photoshop to Gimp (and other image tools) a long time ago, and it wasn't that bad of a switch for me. Things were in other spots, but it was basically all the same idea. I've used both of those and others since then, and they're all basically the same.

So yeah, I 100% agree that people who hate 1 or the other are mostly just used to what they've been using, and it's not about how bad the software is.

aifarts2• 3 years ago

Fully agree. I was playing in the early 90ies with warez CDs and played with most photo editing packages at the time as a poor teenager.

Photoshop for me was actually the worst software package of the bunch from a casual user, and never understood why it was so popular. My impression was that without plugins it was next to worthless.

As I migrated to full-time linux early, gimp wasn't perfect to what I was used to, but it was pretty ok. The ui is a bit different, but nothing extreme. I really don't see the parallel with blender: blender today still requires a minimum of RTFM to get going, while you can do almost everything with gimp just by trial and error.

I assume there are nuances you encounter as you get more deep into photo editing. But as a newcomer, and my experience with greenfield colleagues to both, is that this is just an internet trope. You get used to one, and complain about that "the other is not the same". This is the dumbest form of complaining ever.

I've attempted multiple times to use krita for example after reading HN and seeing the praise, and while I agree it has a somewhat more intuitive ui, for actual photo editing (that is, not drawing), I still prefer gimp.

enriquto• 3 years ago

Your message intriguing... Can you point to some specific examples of frustration? I've never used Photoshop, but as an occasional user of gimp it seems quite natural and intuitive to me. I'd like to see what could be greatly improved about it.

snodnipper• 3 years ago

I agree - I have used the gimp since 1998 and when using other apps (e.g. Affinity) I often return to Gimp and Inkscape because I understand their UIs best.

virtue3• 3 years ago

From what I understood about GIMPs development is that they have to purposefully make things "different" from photoshop so as to not get sued. Which makes going from PS to GIMP incredibly painful (I too, tried a few times).

I think if you come into GIMP fresh without using other tools it is probably beter.

I usually ended up relying on paint.net back in the day instead of GIMP on windows tho.

timeon2• 3 years ago

Yeah GIMP has it's issues but GP is influenced by vendor lock-in.

Better example is Inkspace (because it is more comparable to closed-source alternatives): transition from Corel Draw to Inkspace is much easier then from Adobe Illustrator.

I feel GP's pain, I'm in same situation ...but there are different UX/UI paradigms.

prokoudine11• 3 years ago

From what I understood about GIMPs development is that they have to purposefully make things "different" from photoshop so as to not get sued.

I don't know how these rumours get started but that is simply not true.

GIMP does some things differently and then it does some things the same (because it's just how this type of features work). And then some things were purposefully verbatim-copied from Photoshop (think Heal tool and Perspective Clone tool) because they looked like a good idea.

Personally, I find it incredibly frustrating that this type of conversation always boils down to "If you are asking for explanation why copying Photoshop is good, then you are flat-out refusing to change UI and purposefully making things different".

OliveMate• 3 years ago

As someone who went through the same experience it'd take a lot for me to even think about touching GIMP again. I'm sure that it's a viable Photoshop alternative but any functionality is obscured under a web of riddles.

Blender's UI used to be nightmarish and backwards for any newcomer (why would they make right click select things instead of left??), but as someone who's tinkered with it over the last decade the UI changes introduced in 2.8 finally made things comprehensible. GIMP needs much the same, but I doubt it'll happen until a wider community (or some industry) incentivise it.

FireInsight• 3 years ago

I still think of gimp as one of the worst UX experiences in my life and it makes blenders interface seem amazing in comparison

I never get the comments like this I see about Blender. After the 2.8 redesign, on which the major versions after it have only improved, I felt that the program is really good to use. Well, I'm a Blenderer, I know the basic Blender keybinds. If I didn't, the experience would be much worse. But once you know about shift+a, tab, and x, using the program should be no problem. I feel that the UI is pretty intuitive and internally consistent.

But this is just my experience... Maybe some have a harder time forming intuitions.

Conscat• 3 years ago

I hate Maya ever since I tried Blender 2.8

archerx6• 3 years ago

I can use 3Ds max with pretty much one hand and when I zoom with the mouse wheel it zooms where the cursor is an not the center of the screen. The metaphor I like to use for blender is it is like riding a bike with the seat missing, you can get to where you need to but the ride is much less comfortable. Gimp is like a bike with no seat, you have to peddle in reverse and the handle bars also work in reverse.

I’ve used many other 3D programs, even some that don’t exist anymore like XSI so no baby duck syndrome here but I just find blender just not fun to use. Even milkshape 3D back in the early 2000s was way more intuitive than blender.

fredley• 3 years ago

Photopea is an embarrassment to GIMP. I had a very similar experience trying to use GIMP once. Using Photopea was seamless and easy and it hasn't lacked any feature I've wanted yet.

b1122• 3 years ago

For me, the relentlessly changing gimp gui is what drives me nuts.

I need to use it, every so often (once a year, but for a week or more), and every couple of years, options move, settings change, everything.

And it always does seem to do things in a weird way.

mariusor• 3 years ago

I'd be very curious to learn which parts of the GUI you mean, I think in 15 years of using GIMP, I've never had this problem, though granted, I never used it at a professional level.

The only things that I can think of is some more tools appearing on the same buttons in the interface, or more options in the Tools/Filters menus.

masfoobar2• 3 years ago

Not suggesting your comment is not without merit. I can understand going from Photoshop to Gimp can be frustrating but I think we can pick many examples that follows the same pattern. I guess it is more about what you are use to than anything.

I am a software engineer, and familiar with Windows and GNU/Linux systems. There are a few good development software I use. However, If I was handed an Apple Mac Laptop for working on a new project, I am sure it will be a very frustrating experience for me. It is not because the 'apple experience' is bad. It seems like a well-though-out system but I am sure to be annoyed and wasting time trying to figure how to do things in the OS as well as the software I am using.

Now I do not call my self a graphic designer by any means. I do know enough of Gimp to do a number of things. I guess I am good with a working knowledge. I am sure if I was given Photoshop I would be frustrated trying to do X, Y and Z.

Maybe there is a bit of bias showing on my part. To have a package like Gimp (or Blender, Inkscape, etc) that is Free Software is just a huge win. Of course, maybe I can say that considering I am not an expert designer that needs to use these types of software 24/7.

With GIMP (and Blender) I am mostly using the keyboard shortcuts. Maybe this helps balance what is annoying UX? I dont know.

archerx6• 3 years ago

Going from photoshop to gimp is not like going from windows to mac os. Mac os is annoying in the fact that its restrictive because it wants to be safe and protect the user from themselves at all cost but it is still very very intuitive.

rightbyte3• 3 years ago

In the end, what the gimp team should focus on is the UX of gimp

Oh I hate to break it to you, but you are part of the problem ;)

Please Gimp, leave the things exactly where they are. Thank you.

Learning new UIs just sucks. It is the way it is.

raincole4• 3 years ago

I really wonder how many people still believe Blender should have stayed in 2.79 UI paradigm today.

d3w4s92• 3 years ago

Yeah, that kind of attitude is surely going to help the development of GIMP.

There are lots of alternatives to Photoshop these days, free or paid, open source or not, and most of them are vastly better than GIMP in many ways. Yes I have used almost all of them. I won't be surprised if GIMP is forgotten to oblivion in a few years and only mentioned in forums like hacker news by amateurs who for some reason loves this abusive relationship.

archerx6• 3 years ago

Because of people like you gimp will never reach its full potential and wallow in mediocrity. Gimp can have a blender style redemption arc but people like you will fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening because five guys like the UI as it is the thousands who say it is horrible be damned.

Learning bad UIs sucks and thats not the way it should. I relearned the unreal engine ui three time udk/ue4/ue5 and it never sucked, in fact it was a lot of fun.

d3w4s92• 3 years ago

Agreed. I am willing to pay for a Photoshop license out of pocket than getting paid to use GIMP. Every time someone says "use GIMP" I wonder how much time they have spent designing/drawing anything and what level of experience they have. It is not a matter of different UX -- it is a matter of whether the UX makes sense at all. GIMP stands in your way of productivity.

And I notice UX is a big problem for GNU software from that era, and to some extent community driven open source software in general. Of course there are notable exceptions like IINA, but often it is like "we have this feature" and are done with it and nobody bothers to work on improving the UX.

skripp• 3 years ago

I also can’t stand the gimp ui/ux. I haven’t tried it myself but I just googled this[0].

[0] https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

darajava• 3 years ago

I agree. I also think this about Figma though. I’ve been using it a fair amount for a few months now, and while it’s powerful, a lot of it is very unintuitive.

unixhero• 3 years ago

Should have gone with Krita

blooalien5• 3 years ago

Krita is a great piece of software for certain tasks, for sure. I use it alongside Blender, GIMP, and Inkscape. Well worth keeping it installed and ready for those times it's just the best tool for the job at hand.

ponorin• 3 years ago

I'm a happy user of GIMP whe also happened to have switched from Photoshop. I even managed to use keyboard shortcuts cuz it's so intuitive. I never make efforts to learn them, not in gimp not elsewhere, but the description was straightforward that I would have a hard time not learning it. (P for paint/pen, M for move, T for text, Shift+E for erasor)

Now I like Krita too, but mostly because of the pen library. Krita is actually less intuitive than GIMP imo (Why are there different moving tools for vector and raster layers? How do I enlarge my selection? How do I flip the canvas for correction reasons? I know there's a shortcut for that, I pressed it by accident.)

Would I call Krita bad UX? Not really, it has a place in my workflow. But I prefer GIMP for its power and since I can get around it well. They have been obviously stretched thin for a long time, I myself have been waiting for features and improvements in GIMP for years. But really, I think people underestimate the complexity of these tools and quick to label them unintuitive. I don't think you can overhaul the UI without removing some or many features GIMP currently has.

cchance• 3 years ago

100% with you i kept hearing about. gimp being the defacto FOSS standard for image editing/creation, but holy crap its like you need a degree to get started with it

jailbirdBD• 3 years ago

Used Photoshop since its really early days, but since I moved to Linux as an OS, it's really hard to find an alternative. Eventually, I fall back to Photopea, as Gimp is just a PITA to work in.

bj-rn• 3 years ago

For a quick edit I am using Affinity Suite in bottles/wine: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/182758-aff...

If it gets more involved I boot into windows.

Beijinger• 3 years ago

Thanks for mentioning it. Gimp is okay, except for the missing CMKY. There was once a CMKY support plug-in, wasn't there?

Do you know what I miss? The inkscape competitor Xara Xtreme (XL). Gone..

prokoudine11• 3 years ago

The separate+ plugin isn't maintained, but GIMP 2.99/3.0 has late binding for CMYK (basically, work in RGB, export in CMYK).

shmerl• 3 years ago

Once 3.0 is released, we can have a long conversation about the way the team plans their work, which is not great, and the way they finance it, which is even worse. But right now the community needs to finish off this SOB of a release.

Gimp would benefit from faster pace of development and more funding. Blender is a good example how it can work.

puzzlingcaptcha• 3 years ago

Krita also seems to be doing better in that regard, despite not having the massive industry backing that Blender enjoys.

ludston• 3 years ago

Usually when there is a post on HN about some open source project with a GUI there is a deluge of comments complaining about it for one reason or another. Even though it's free. I don't understand why.

Gimp is a wonderful piece of free software that I use often, and I greatly appreciate the work and time the maintainers are putting into it.

mvdtnz2• 3 years ago

You don't understand why, when software has a bad interface, and said software is under discussion on a web forum, people discuss the bad UI? I find that very hard to believe.

diffeomorphism• 3 years ago

You don't understand the difference between complaining and discussion? Seems even harder to believe.

doublerabbit3• 3 years ago

Yes the common argument is about the UI and which one where that Blender and Krita are both the new kids on the block. They were started from scratch with the ability to have a clean UI.

GIMP not so. Its an ancient carved releic from the days of GTK2. If you've ever worked with old X you'll know.

Back then UI was in a different world than to what we have now. It's unfortunate that the UI of GIMP just never has been rekindled to the newer century, but that's a you problem not a them problem.

However saying that, nothing is stopping you from spear driving the new GUI design. It's open source after all.

graphe2• 3 years ago

It's a pain point for people who want to see it succeed. It's like the mole guy from Austin powers. Just because it's free doesn't make it good enough. It's not hard to pirate Photoshop, which is also free. Krita is a better Photoshop replacement than gimp is.

doublerabbit3• 3 years ago

Krita is new, GIMP is legacy.

It's a hard and very time consuming tax to replace UI within a legacy application.

GIMP has existed long before the entitled generation of Linuxers who wish for everything to be handed to them on a golden plate.

However sometimes that plate is covered in muck that you need to clean yourself.

Mashimo• 3 years ago

Even though it's free. I don't understand why.

Because if no one would ever complain, there is a lower chance it will change.

Vinnl• 3 years ago

If complaints were enough to fuel change, GIMP would have had a truly amazing UI by now.

amelius• 3 years ago

Looking forward to the stable diffusion tools (I'm guessing they will be in there).

nacs• 3 years ago

Krita has a number of Stable Diffusion plugins (all OSS).

prokoudine11• 3 years ago

There you go: https://github.com/blueturtleai/gimp-stable-diffusion :)

walteweiss3• 3 years ago

This plugin is no longer actively developed.

senectus1• 3 years ago

and no mention of wayland support :-(

planede• 3 years ago

https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#gimp-30-development...

work in progress

kubafu• 3 years ago

This is what I came here for too. In the past I got an impression that Gimp 3 will run on Wayland as it's based on GTK 3, source: https://www.gimp.org/news/2020/11/06/gimp-2-99-2-released/

colordrops2• 3 years ago

Beta builds are working on Wayland for me.

3836293648• 3 years ago

There's a difference between Wayland support and working on Wayland. They're asking about actual wayland support, not xwayland, which presumably was never and issue

jbirer• 3 years ago

Have you tried not using a monolithic display server?

ac29• 3 years ago

Wayland has been working for a long time on the 3.x development releases. I run a wayland only (no xwayland) system, and I have been using GIMP development releases without issue for years.

mattbis• 3 years ago

Reading that if there is a project that needs more hands it has to be GIMP... That being said without introducing more workload than it fixes. I am not sure how long the lead up time is to being useful. Seems to me just fixing bugs would really help them - if can be done - without causing further issues.

mkl• 3 years ago

I remember being really excited about the first GIMP release that partly used GEGL [1], when a fully GEGL-based GIMP 3.0 seemed right around the corner. That was GIMP 2.6 in 2008. I've been using GIMP for over 20 years at this point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEGL

roschdal• 3 years ago

GIMP is great!

post-factum• 3 years ago

Is there a link to an official announcement please, not to some suspicious site hosted in Muscovy? Thank you.

prokoudine11• 3 years ago

Both Patreon (original announcement by lead dev), GNOME's gitlab instance (where the roadmap is) and Libre Arts (linked post) are hosted in the US.

What's causing your suspicion?

xbmcuser• 3 years ago

GIMP ui is hard for new users and because of the extremely hard learning curve most people give up on it. People overreact about the gui complains but people that have been using it for years have blinders same is the case for most of its developers.

Similar is the case for calibre another popular open source project I have been using it from almost its inception so I don't see the problems that new users face that have grown up with a new gui rules and interfaces.

Both of these have pain points for new users but the legacy behind the code makes it impossible for the current devs to change it. So when people say don't like it then you should fork it is actually the only real way that it can move forward. And then if it is good enough change it might get back into the main fork otherwise it won't.

toastercat• 3 years ago

I used to use PhotoShop heavily and still have a lot of the UI muscle-memorized. I switched to GIMP + https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP and found it mostly fits my needs for basic image editing.

dontlaugh• 3 years ago

I'm continuously surprised it doesn't get renamed to GNU Imp.

Shish2k• 3 years ago

Am I reading correctly that non-destructive editing, advanced colourspace support, and reliable hidpi display support are all unlikey to make it into 3.0…? Does anybody know what is expected to make it into 3.0? (IIRC the switch to gtk3 is happening at last, which is nice… even though gtk4 was released in 2020)

prokoudine11• 3 years ago

Am I reading correctly that non-destructive editing, advanced colourspace support, and reliable hidpi display support are all unlikey to make it into 3.0…?

GIMP 2.99 already handles color spaces better than 2.10. E.g. you already have late binding for CMYK (but not early binding, that's post-3.0 stuff).

There's no telling if layer filters will make it to 3.0, I guess we'll see how much is done at feature freeze time. So I wouldn't be too fast to jump at conclusions, Even if it's missing in 3.0.0, 3.0.2 would have it.

As for HiDPI, the three way switch for canvas zooming suggested by Jehan here — https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/5206 — is something I hope they will reconsider. There should be a better way to handle it.

Does anybody know what is expected to make it into 3.0?

Everything you see in 2.10 point releases (much was backported from 2.99) plus some extras like GTK3 port, multi-layer selection, complete rewrite of linked layers concept, Lua and JS bindings, and various other things. Because of backporting, separating 3.0-specific changes from the rest is not an easy task.

GIMP 3.0 has a release schedule

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