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Gimp 2.99.2 – GTK3 user interface toolkit (gimp.org)
233 points by constantinum on Nov 6, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 179 comments



What is it with the simplified Gtk file dialogs?

Whenever I use one I am instantly annoyed because I get the impression that some UI-concept from MacOS was badly copied, but is a mismatch for arguably more poweruser-centric Linux user base. Once I discovered that Ctrl-L can bring up the url/file path I found it at least usable, but still not pleasant.

Am I using it wrong? Can I change the default system wide somehow? Is there a design document which can finally convince me that this is generally a good idea, just not for me?

Also, some Gtk apps had/have tearable menus, a shame these went out of fashion. Is there something fundamentally wrong with that, too, or can this be enable globally for Gtk, and maybe even Qt apps?


you can change it system-wide... but there's a bug which means it constantly gets reset

the most annoying thing about the dialogs is if you type a filename in: instead of selecting the file with that name it starts doing a recursive search...

no-one has EVER wanted to do that


This is rapidly becoming GNOME’s most famous bug. The developers still claim it’s working as intended.


GNOME suddenly changing things for the worse, breaking muscle memory and making previously easy things difficult or impossible, while tone-deaf developers intone the "it's not broken, your workflow's broken" mantra in the background, has become a regular thing. It's like living in hurricane country and accepting you'll need to replace the windows from time to time.

I really wish they'd stop doing this, though.


Have you tried either GNOME Classic or MATE? It seems like a difficult ask to request that developers stop trying new things.


To me, the most famous bug is that an entry is selected by default when you enter a directory. This renders it nearly impossible to select a directory (instead of a file) from the picker, because you will always enter the directory instead of picking it! The only way is to first enter the target directory, deselect the default with control-click, and then hit okay.


> The developers still claim it’s working as intended.

If they are the developers they probably know what they intended.


That's why I'm using Nemo as file manager in Ubuntu. Unfortunately the files dialog is still Nautilus but it's okish there, given I don't have to do much when picking a file or deciding where to save it.


Install nautilus typeahead search fork to fix that: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/05/enable-nautilus-type-ahe...


The file save dialog is the worst UI I have to fight with daily. It's such a seriously badly designed piece of UX.

Is there a simple way to save a file to a parent folder in the UI without using Ctrl+L? Other than select the grandparent, and from there select the parent?


In the filename box, press enter to save to the dir you're viewing rather than selecting one deeper.


Thank you very much. Something that genuinely makes my computer use more tolerable.


There's an issue asking for an icon view with thumbnails in the GTK file picker. The discussion has been ongoing for sixteen years: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233


Thank you for the Ctrl+L trick! This has been killing me for ages.


> Once I discovered that Ctrl-L can bring up the url/file path I found it at least usable.

This seems to be the same shortcut on Gnome and Windows, so I'm curious where it comes from.


> I'm curious where it comes from.

Web browsers. Ctrl-L = focus location bar since at least Netscape Navigator.


I didnt know about ctrl+l. I use Alt+D all the time.


Netscape Navigator on Mac used it in 1999:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/netscape-keyboard.html

I don't have a thought of where to check next. It could originate there, as a mnemonic for command+link.


It's "L" is because it focuses the location bar.


I've always felt Gtk file dialogs make life difficult for you. Thanks for pointing out Ctrl+L though... how wise of them to make that feature so "accessible". NOT. :-(


Ctrl+L is a pretty standard "location" shortcut. Try it in almost all web browsers, Windows Explorer and quite a few other applications with an address bar ;-)


> a mismatch for arguably more poweruser-centric Linux user base.

Uhm, to the best of my knowledge the macOS file dialogue is far more powerful than anything the various linux toolkits offer.


Which is to their point.


I thought their point was that Linux shouldn't poorly copy Apple because they have a different, more power-user centric client base. But copying Apple isn't the problem here, Apple is strictly superior on all metrics, including power user friendliness.


Yes, they’re talking about how the GNOME one is poorly designed, not the macOS one.


There's this pattern of taking stable functional things and then hobbling it, stripping it of features, and giving it clunky ux patterns in the name of imitating some direction apple inc has taken.

It's a really annoying pattern and it really needs to stop


Yes but my point was that the Apple direction, in this case, is both far more easy to use and more suitable for power users. You can efficiently navigate the apple file dialogue with the keyboard (e.g. press '~' for tab-completable paths in your home dir; ctrl+N -> recently used folders; Cmd+F for what is basically a document DB search across your whole filesystem etc).


Yes, but there's no inherent reason why there can't be something similar or even more powerful in GNOME and KDE. This is not an argument about "who is superior", picking camps or "who copies whom". Linux clearly has a higher ratio of power users than OS X so it'd make sense to have UX catering for them.



> No non-destructive adjustment layers ...

As promised.

They have a roadmap for which version it will be in - a roadmap that's been out there for years. Complaining that you don't have non-destructive adjustment layers for a version that's definitely not supposed to have it is a waste of time.


Is the roadmap influenced by when patents expire?

Edit: that would be a smart reason to plan so far ahead & delay features


No - it's just a list of logical steps. Things they need to implement before they can tackle adjustment layers. The reason it is taking so long is because it's a lot of work.


We are not aware of any patents affecting the development of GIMP.


> People are waiting for non-destructive adjustment layers for over 10 years now.

10 years? That's nothing!

I've been waiting 30 years for someone to throw a bunch of cash on my lap while I'm sitting in the sofa. Nobody, I mean literally NOBODY has done that yet.

Bunch of selfish people, that's what I think!


30 years? Looxury! When I were a lad we had to wait 50 years for breakfast, every morning.


In the snow. Uphill. Both ways.


Just pouring some salt into your wounds: this video <https://youtu.be/RBL1cVzIQik> is over nine years old :^)

(I don't think it's exactly the same, but at least similar)


The GIMP roadmap indicates they're hoping support non-destructive editing in 3.2: https://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap#GIMP_3.2

They apparently haven't thought about how to implement it yet.


looks like the prep work for it (porting to GEGL and gtk3) will finally be done in this version though, so you know, the slow bird probably also eventually catches the worm


Gimp is a volunteer-run open source project. You ready to get cracking on that patch?


Non-destructive adjustment laters are pretty much must-have for a image editing software for it to be taken seriously. It’s something the GIMP devs should be focusing on, not something that a random person on the internet does on their free time. Especially considering it has been a well requested feature for over 10 years.

Ps. you’re not going to get anyone to commit anything with that kind of message. You’re just driving people away from oss.


Most of the current developers _are_ random people on the internet who decided to contribute to it in their free time. If you have noticed, repeatedly asking for a feature when it's already on the roadmap as a high priority item and has been there for some years also does not help the feature get implemented any faster.


They just should have done what Krita did - gather money, hire developers full time.


That requires administrative staff to run the fundraiser, handle the accounting, do the hiring...


GIMP does theoretically have indirect access to administrative staff from the FSF through GNU, I think?


Well, a few things. It would be GNOME Foundation, but historically they have existed mostly to coordinate volunteers and have been reluctant to hire developers because of that. (It creates conflicts of interest) In general, the people who are good at fundraising are already heavily in demand and they know it.

Plus, the lead developer(s) would have to commit to increased management responsibilities in order for it to happen, and they don't seem to be willing to for various reasons.


s/They just should have done/I will do/ please.


And you should have done what Bezos did and become a multimillionaire.


> Non-destructive adjustment laters are pretty much must-have for a image editing software for it to be taken seriously

I use GIMP all the time and this is something I've never even though about. Seems like an unwarranted sweeping generalization.


I think it depends on what you do. They are really useful for e.g. web design, anything where you may want to re-use an effect, possibly come back later to adjust it everywhere you used it. For web design specifically you can often just prototype with css3 now, but it would be really nice to have this in gimp, and it does look like this version was a major step towards getting there


Yes, let's add non-destructive editing on top of horrible design decisions, unmaintained UI toolkit with a crapton of bugs, semi-working graphic tablets support, barely working custom HiDPI support etc. What a splendid idea you got there :)


TFA lists improvements to graphics tablet support, HiDPI support, and — in the title itself — switching to a more maintained UI toolkit.


1) That is precisely my point. End-users often think that new stuff can be easily added on top of older stuff, and if developers don't do that, they are just stupid, shortsighted, or whatever. For 2.10, we had to finish the GEGL port to give people much anticipated things like high bit depth precision editing (up to 32f per channel). For 3.0, we now have to port GIMP to an actually maintained version of GTK because some things are just broken for good in GTK2, this is mostly done and will be polished in the 2.99.x series. Once it's done, we will have the solid foundations to expose non-destructive editing (unless someone really clever arrives to hack it into v3.0 but I wouldn't hold my breath for that).

2) I'm the guy who wrote a chunk of that release notes (and most of the release notes in the past 10+ years). You don't need to babytalk to me about any of that stuff :)


The GP didn't babytalk you. They just pointed out a seeming contradiction.

Lashing out at bystanders & spamming passive-aggressive smilies does not cultivate trust in GIMP's leadership.


I couldn't care less about people who see one smiley face and go completely berserk. I never met you. I don't know anything about you. I will forget you in a few minutes.


I certainly hope you'll forget about me. It's unhealthy to nurse grudges against random, online commenters.

Otherwise, all that building resentment will feed back into your insecurities, which will distort your sensitivity to criticism and magnify your next explosion.


That is prokoudine's point: you need to get the fundamental switch to GTK3 done first and only then start to implement non-destructive editing.


GTK wouldn’t exist without GIMP, so I’m willing to forgive them for that :)


I am getting tired of HN shitting on volunteer work especially when a new milestone is reached after literally years of effort.


Then don't read the thread (it's always the same conversation anyway) but it's a fact that Gimp (like another prominent software in its own domain) is often presented as a Photoshop replacement and personally I can't switch to GIMP because I rely a lot on non-destructive filters.


Or maybe don't post accusative comments on how people aren't spending their free time on the stuff you want?


Then just close the comment section for Gimp release because what more can be said apart from 'thanks' then if critics aren't welcome/tolerated or interpreted as "you are shitting on people's work".

The question is: can Gimp be criticized ? Obviously, from all the Gimp thread I saw, HN isn't the place to have a conversation about it.

edit: now that I think about it it seems to me that Firefox is taking way more heat when a release is announced.

edit2: to be fair, I do agree the parent could have worded things like "Still no non-destructive filtering but it's on the roadmap" or something like that. I am certainly not shitting on Gimp but I tend to react to people who claim it's a 1-1 photoshop replacement, it's simply not true. It doesn't mean Gimp hasn't huge advantages over Photoshop. Every photographer I know and who use it prefer it to Photoshop after some time, same when you need to automate or need some custom plugin to manipulate images.


The problem isn't that people are posting "Hey, I'd really like to use GIMP but I'm still waiting for feature X", the problem is the accusative nature of the comments.

The top comment that started this thread definitely had more than an accusatory aftertaste to it. I can't find the story/interview right now, but GIMP is literally just something like 3 or 4 guys working on it in their spare time.

For a lot of folks, GIMP is a fine photoshop alternative, even for more advanced uses. Is it perfect? Obviously not. But remember, it's just a bunch of devs in their spare time. Don't like it? Then don't use it, these people really don't owe anyone anything. How many devs are working on photoshop full-time? It's fine to point out "unfortunately GIMP isn't quite there as a 1-to-1 photoshop alternative, because [...]", but IMO it's important to do this in a way that doesn't crap all over the dev's best efforts.

I worked on a few projects where people felt they had the desire to come in and say that I "must" implement feature X or Y because "commercial product Y has it". Like, mate, I'm just this random guy with a day job and hobbies outside of software that occasionally works on this. Glad it's useful to you, but you don't tell me what to do. It's probably not your intention, but these kind of comments come off as really shitty.


The Gimp devs taking nine years to port from Gimp Toolkit 2 to Gimp Toolkit 3 kinda invalidates all claims about porting between Qt versions being too hard, doesn't it?


A major reason for not shipping GTK3 port, which was largely completed a long time ago, is that GIMP 2.x has a stable plugins API and GTK2+ is exposed in said API. At the same time there has been other major revamps of the API with changing image processing layer to use GEGL. It was decided to release both breaking changes as GIMP 3.x, instead of breaking first the one, then the other.


The port from GTK2 to GTK3 isn't even that hard in my experience. It's a lot of typing but for the most part stuff works the same with a few exceptions (like tooltips).

It's kind of important too because bugs in Gtk2 aren't getting fixed anymore. I ran into DBUS related issue with Gtk2 and ScrolledWindows in Ubuntu 20 and the dev response was basically "ew, gross, I'm not touching that". Fixing it required me to rewrite the app to use Gtk3 instead.


No, there are a lot of breaking changes beyond 2->3 transition. Basically, everything had changed: toolkit, extensions, styling, icons, theming

Devs wanted to do it all at once


Still should not take nine years, even if it is an oss project.


GTK hasn't been the Gimp Toolkit in years. It's much more the GNOME Toolkit these days.


Yes, siding with you on this.

Biggest fault of the Gtk/GNOME ecosystem these days is a small bunch of atrociously toxic people centering around RedHat shouting "Nobody besides me works on this, and that! So sit tightly, and shut up with your feedback!," while completely forgetting that it was them who scared off, and trolled out most normal people out of the GNOME community, including some of the best devs they had.


Can you elaborate on this? Who was scared off, and how/why was this done?


There is a lengthy history of general toxicity, gatekeeping attitudes and the like in the Gnome dev community, dating back to the early 2.x days. This extensive comment https://dot.kde.org/comment/60560#comment-60560 dates back to 2003, and back then RedHat wasn't even heavily involved in development (the major corporate sponsors back then were Eazel and Ximian, which are basically unheard of today) but clearly the overall attitude has not changed much since then.


That appears to be a completely out-of-context comment about GNOME made on a KDE blog for unclear reasons. But anyway, I looked through most of the links in that comment and I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. There are some heated arguments around technical issues in those mailing list posts, but there are also many positive comments such as this:

>If anything, we have to turn the GNOME community around and make this community a tolerant community, and a community of love. I have to say that I am surprised by how well the gnome-love mailing list has taken of, and surprised to see various newcomers to the platform actually writing code and becoming productive.

Also, that was quite a long time ago (some posts are from earlier than 2003) and most of those people involved in those threads don't appear to be associated with the project anymore. It certainly seems like they were able to work out some of their process issues in the last 17 years seeing as how the bonobo/orbit parts were dropped entirely.


That's a very, very old "manifesto" that was pasted verbatim into almost every FLOSS news site and mailing list at the time (relevant or not), written by a well known troll and harasser who was removed from multiple FLOSS communities.


To me, it started to go down hill when RedHat hired designers to work on Gnome and they decided Gnome 3 absolutly had to work on tablets. For context, it's the time Google also stopped to rely on metrics and gave the key to designers, and tablets were going to kill both the PC and the laptop.

Not to say UX designer are not important, but, IMHO, very good one are rare and stubborn one common place. Not that we devs are any better.


Is there any technical merit for Gtk at this point?


Maybe it's just familiarity, or I'm out of touch since it's been a few years since I was really evaluating the options, but I find GTK much nicer to work with than Qt. It seems to do better with language bindings too. GTK being a C API seems to make it a lot easier to auto-generate bindings for any language with an FFI. Qt, being both primarily a C++ API, and also with the custom preprocessor and signal/slot nonsense seems like it's much harder to make sensible bindings for.


> GTK being a C API seems to make it a lot easier to auto-generate bindings for any language with an FFI.

Not only that but as outlined in that article, GObject introspection allows easy integration with most popular dynamic languages (most importantly JS and Python) without the need for specific bindings.


JS and Python are the best Qt bindings, though.

GObject helps out with other languages like Rust and Lua.


QT python bindings were rather confusing with multiple libraries and basically very poor documentation when I checked a couple of years ago. Not to mention QTs java binding also was not a good story.


This hasn't been the case for a few years. PyQt has been excellent from the beginning of Qt5, and as of 2018 or so the Qt for Python binding is also in very good shape.

I code cross-platform in C++ or Python primarily, so maybe that's why Qt is such a good fit. All the frequent version incompatibilities of Gtk3 just made me not really look into it any further.


Python + Qt got waaay better with the release of Qt 5. It's called wither "Qt for Python" or PySide2. I dunno why it has two names but the docs are fantastic. https://doc.qt.io/qtforpython/contents.html


> It's called wither "Qt for Python" or PySide2. I dunno why it has two names

That brought back some funky history.

In the days of yore, when Qt 4.5 roamed the lands and 4.7 did not exist yet, there was a set of Python bindings called PyQt. They were ... a bit clunky, but they worked. Perhaps more importantly, they were also a subject of cross-company political wrangling.

Nokia bought Qt back in mid-noughties and wanted to make the toolkit more easily accessible for mixed commercial use. Authors of PyQt didn't want to relicense to include LPGL as an option.[0] So PySide was born.

When the development of Qt5 got under way, the developers realised they could finally break many of the internals and eliminate a lot of nasty legacy baggage. The public API remained mostly the same, but low-level bindings, and pretty much anything that poked under the hood, could expect APIs to change, headers to go through contortions and so on.

Considering that the bindings for Qt5 are called PySide2, I can make an educated guess that it was in the end easier to rebuild the new bindings from scratch for 5 and onwards, rather than try to shoehorn the use of possibly conflicting low-level APIs between the two major versions. The name "PySide" was already known in developer circles as "LGPL friendly Python bindings", so holding on to the base name makes perfect sense.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PySide


PyQt is a really good binding. Compared to e.g. wxPython (Phoenix), which is built using PyQt's tooling, the latter is full of jank, like whether something is a property seems to be random (SetIcon(icon) -> property, SetIcons(iconbundle) -> not a property, just one funny example). Some things ARE properties, but they're not writeable, even if there actually is a SetXXX method. Some things convert types automatically, some don't. In a bunch of cases there is weirdness, like what you return from a OnGetAttr needs to be protected from Python GC, otherwise it is silently (!?) ignored. Add the jank of wxWidgets itself, and PyQt/PySide look even better.


I guess being the one that is more GNU/Linux oriented, so that is what most managed languages frameworks bind to (Swing, SWT, GtkSharp, Gtk-rs, Gtkmm, PyGtk,...), specially because of GObject it is relatively easy to generate bindings.


Glade seems to be simpler and saner than QML. With Glade, the UI markup is just a declarative layout, and the code is totally decoupled from the UI. QML has some weird javascript thing going on, and there's more coupling.


There could be a licensing merit if the unclear and unfavorable situation about licensing and availability of new Qt releases continues to deteriorate.


Qt licensing is not unclear nor deteriorating.


May be that it is at least allows one to write code in c/c++, rather than the "moc" macro language system used by QT.


Simply add https://github.com/woboq/verdigris so you eliminate moc and can use C++ ≥ 14.


I wasn't too happy when my distro upgraded from 2.8 to 2.10. The new icon set for the toolbox may be more trendy, but I have a much harder time recognizing/understanding which is which not they're all monochrome.

Glad to see HiDPI come up.


You can change that on the settings. I know because I had the same problem and you can choose a more familiar iconset.


>You can change that on the settings.

Always a valid reply in Linux discussions.


Though not always in GNOME discussions j/k


"You can change that in dconf. Though maybe there is a tweak for it. Or perhaps it's a behavior you can script in gnome-shell."


More like "you can change that in dconf, but there's a bug[0] that makes it reset every time you restart the application".

[0] sotto voce "that we're probably never going to fix"


To be fair, that's part of why I use Linux :)


The silver lining to that is that I ended up using shortcuts that I never bothered memorizing before.


I'm so poisoned by election news that I read "Nate Silver" in your comment.


Yeah, except I guess 98% of HiDPI users are on MacOS, a platform they are currently unable to create builds for.


It's 2020. I've been sitting in front of two 4k monitors for perhaps five years now, under Ubuntu Mate. Every month or so an HN comment implies it doesn't work. ;-)


So many years of people telling me that my exact setup does not work, yet here I am not remembering the last time I had an issue with displays on Linux. It has even gotten _better_ since I moved to Wayland which I am also told does not work.


To be fair, the last time I did was when I bought my current monitor, this year. 2560x1440, and only works properly when I log in so my X config loads.

I messed up some PAM config shortly after, and had to chroot to fix it - couldn't read a single letter I was typing (impossibly small and distorted for the number of pixels used to display them, character widths all over the place too) but manager to get it done, very carefully and slowly...

I probably should've made getting it working system wide a priority after that (maybe it's as simple as I used my user config rather than /etc, I can't remember) but I haven't. I suppose worst case I could use a different older monitor anyway.


Agree - been using 4k monitors with Fedora for years as well, and whilst there's still a few warts it's been steadily getting better and is perfectly usable.

Looking forward to seeing Gimp with native support though


So I am the 2%. Glad anyway :)


Ya there certainly isn’t and hidpi windows or Mac users


Hello from the 2%.


Just on time for GTK 4. Pretty ironic considering that GTK stands for Gimp ToolKit.


And Inkscape only updated to 3 earlier this year. I wish the GTK devs would realize that these applications are the life blood of their toolkit. Calculators, calendars, and even mail apps can be popped out easy peasy when they need to be. Applications like GIMP, Inkscape, and Ardour take years to become usable and competitive.


this is problem #1 of Linux Desktop. Toolkits and Libraries constantly changing and reinventing the wheel. Actually a big part of developing an GTK App is actually catching up with the API changes. As a proof of this see the early how-tos of GTK 3.0 and 3.2 and see the recent ones and see how much it changed.

There were plenty of apps changing from GTK to Qt awhile ago i suspect GTK4 will be the next. As for Gimp and Inkscape it will probably take another decade to catch up.


Call me a noob but why should this problem exist even today ? Why are APIs such grossly incompatible with previous gens such that a complete overwrite is necessary?


Well i think GNOME and even GTK has very few contributors and mainly sponsored by RH and other companies. I suspect they are often getting paid to develop features for subcontracting and other times they want to "modernize" the toolkit and they just write a new API with additional features. We have seen this during DBus introduction, GSettings, Clutter etc... etc... Plus GTK+ is C plus lots of boil plate code to make it "object oriented" which turns to be even a bigger pain when pure GTK+ apps need to update their APIs to catch up with the latest.

But imo this is a general trend on Linux except for the Kernel where Linus and co do a great job to prevent API breakage. The others not so much.


Only half on topic, but I wish GIMP garnered the same amount of industry support that Blender has. It has the bones to be great, it just needs a lot of UI and UX polish, and in open source those things always seem to attract the least passion (which is okay! if people work on something for free and of their own accord, they can pick whatever they want to work on). If some serious industry dough was being poured into GIMP, they could pay people to work on the less-fun bits.

Tbh they also should ditch the NIH attitude. Yes, sometimes Photoshop's behaviour or keybinds are more convoluted than GIMP's, but people have Photoshop's quirks ingrained and making the transition easier is what counts. Blender has an amazing 'industry keybinds' option.


Photoshop is also not a great example of a well designed UI, and needing to replicate many of its idiosyncrasies in GIMP is pointless perhaps.

I learned GIMP first and got very used to its MDI interface, later on using Photoshop I found PS not as comfortable or easy to do the things I wanted to do.


> Tbh they also should ditch the NIH attitude.

Tbh, we always ask people for justification of their UI/UX proposals. We don't say 'no, because Photoshop'. If we say 'no', it's because we think it doesn't make sense for GIMP or breaks existing consistency.


Yeah I agree about the keybinds. With blender, something as simple as left clicking to select objects can make a huge impact learning and using software when you don't have to reset your brain constantly. It can be tough to have like 3 different sets of keys used to navigate different 3d viewports.


I also like the way that on first run Blender will let you select the keybindings that you want to use.

That seems like a good compromise to me.


FreeCAD also has several options for 3d navigation bindings. Really helped smooth the transition.


Good stuffs. As a kid, 3dstudiomax sent me a cease and desist. Today I understand why.


Isn't it more likely that Krita captures that?


Yeah - as with Blender or Libre Office of FreeCad I'm not sure more than one big pro-like open source project can be sustained.

And it seems Krita is moving in the right Blender-like direction to do just that.


> Plugins now possible with Python 3, JavaScript, Lua, and Vala

:O

This is a game changer for me. I could use Python, but I'm a full time JavaScript developer and I'm just not the biggest fan of Python in the world. But if I could script in Gimp using JavaScript... that'd be sick!


A lot of GNOME is written in JavaScript now, this is just GIMP catching up to that ecosystem.


Which is why I eventually switched to XFCE. GJS use is quite noticeable.


IIRC, the optimization benchmarks Canonical did have indicated that JS hasn't been the issue in most of the Gnome performance issues they've worked on.



Took a decade to get there. Yes, some of us didn't follow gnome through this time.


Performance as in CPU usage or memory usage or both ?


I hope they will get rid of it eventually like they got rid of C#/Mono applications.


Never understood why do they need Vala in 2020? They could have focused on improving Rust integration and writing some applications in it.


Vala is pretty much the official gtk language (insofar as there is one), and remains actively developed. Not sure what the problem is.


Vala is much older. And, sure, who need new language, right ? (hint: sarcasm)


Damn! That looks a so much better than the GTK2 2.10 version. And better Wayland & HiDPI support – thank the stars.


Wow, that splash screen is so bad that it wraps around the scale and is actually amazing. I admire not trying to compete with Adobe's colorful, highly polished but extremely boring splash screens.


I think this has been the tradition with GIMP dev version splash screens. They are really tongue-in-cheek. It'll change...


dev version splash screen, it's for fun.


Does anyone know if those hideous GTK3 title bars are rendered by the client (GIMP), or is the person taking the screenshot just using GNOME?


The title bars look identical to everything else on my Gnome 3 system.


Right, and I'm running XFCE with a different theme, or i3 without any titlebars, and every GTK3 app that uses client-side window decorations looks out of place.

I'm not running Gnome 3, I don't ever intend to run Gnome 3, and GTK shouldn't poison the last 15 years of GTK applications to try to bump up the Gnome 3 adoption numbers by attrition.

It's petty and obnoxious.


The titlebars are a design choice made by the app developer, not by GNOME. At least in the sense that it's only part of GNOME's design guidelines, app developers using GTK don't have to follow it if they don't want. There are various ways you can configure/modify a GTK app to hide the titlebars and attempt to use server-side decorations. But either way you are faced with the choice of potentially hiding important functionality if the app developer has decided to put buttons in the titlebar, or having two titlebars like with this patch: https://github.com/PCMan/gtk3-nocsd


Yes, I use GNOME. Usually, I'd go to fullscreen mode to make a screenshot, But this time it was kind of important to show image dimensions and overall amount of layers.


I really hope someone with the right skills can step up and get the MacOS build sorted out.


Why would they do this switch on a minor version number release?


The N.99 pattern is usually meant to be "pre-release of (N+1).0".

And this is a development release anyway. Stable is still 2.10


Oh, I see. Not sure where I got the idea I was running 2.99.1.


They really need to get around to either adopting the Glimpse[1] name, or dropping their current one for something else.

The project's name makes it hard to recommend it in a professional context even when it would get the job done well.

[1] https://glimpse-editor.org/


Did these people seriously fork GIMP just so they can change the name?! I didn't even know anyone cared about that.

I've been using GIMP for many years (since at least 2008) and have heard many valid and not very valid complaints, but never anything about the name being offensive.

GIMP has a lot of problems hurting its adoption in professional settings, but the name is hardly one of them. Creating a fork just for that is bike-shedding to the extreme.


It is an unpleasant slur both in UK and US English. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/gimp


(I'm not a native speaker) It seems like it's really a kind of cruel joke of an acronym, and those of us who don't recognize it just get the worst of both worlds - a bad name and no joke.


Scala means ladder in Italian and Sega means handjob

The French Word fiche means casino token and has been popularized by American Casinos and movies, yet in Italian it reads fike and it's a quite vulgar slur which literally means vaginas but it's used to say "nice looking girls"

It's the plural of fica, which sounds exactly like the Swedish fika, that means coffee break

You can imagine how that sound for an Italian to be offered a fika

Lumia means prostitute in Spanish

BTW a preservative in French is a condom...

The world does not speak English as a native language

Edit: but, as usual, judging from the immediate downvote Americans won't accept that they are only 5% of the World population...


> Lumia means prostitute in Spanish

I had a few Spanish friends while I lived in Australia who found The Mitsubishi Pajero hilarious.

It seems really odd to me that it's still named that considering that Spanish is so widely spoken.

https://translate.google.com/?hl=en#view=home&op=translate&s...


It actually got renamed to Mitsubishi Montero for the Latin American market.


Do not ever try to say you are going to search something or someone in Polish if there are any Czech speakers nearby - the results might be surprising.


The open source world, by and large, uses English as its lingua franca. Of course we're well aware that sometimes commonplace words in one language can mean something offensive in another language.

But I think it highly likely that the original developers of the GIMP knew exactly what it meant in English and probably chose the name because of its English meaning, as a joke that may have been funny in geek circles back then, but now we realize is just in poor taste. (I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they were probably more targeting the sexual connotations of "gimp" and weren't making fun of physically disabled people.)

The downvotes are likely because it seems like you have an axe to grind about English being the de facto common language of the internet, not because people think you don't have a good point to make or because of some silly nationalistic reason.


I have no problem with English

I speak Italian as native language, for me GIMP is just a name, like the BALKARP IKEA sofa, I consider it a bunch of letter stuck together that represent something, but don't mean anything and if they sound like something real, it doesn't really matter.

I also speak English, Spanish, some French, some German

Of course I would never call my product "ugly bitch" but of course I wouldn't also call it pizza

And yet Martin Odersky language before Scala was named pizza

I wouldn't call it merda (it means shit, in the worst possible way)

There's an American band called black merda (in Italian it translates as black shit) they used it because it sound like murder in English

You have to understand that English is not the Lingua franca of anything, at best English spoken by non native English people is

You have to accept that speaking someone else's language doesn't mean you have to accept every cultural issue that people born with it might have

Photoshop is as ridiculous as gimp and I would never take seriously a software in Italian that is called "negozio di foto" from a company called "addobbo" for the operating system "finestre" or "mela"

It's something that would make me think of the kindergarten

But I accept it, ridiculous as they sound, because they are just brands, you get used to it and live on

GIMP is the best of the lotto because it means GNU image manipulation program, it's the most professional name of them all

And GNU is not the animal, is an acronym

If English people have a problem with their language, it's not a global problem

and btw, what all of you are getting wrong by supporting this infinite rant on the name of this particular program that come out every single time it is mentioned, is that the name is GIMP the all uppercase acronym not gimp the noun

Like IBM or IKEA or SKYPE or YAHOO (yes, they are all acronyms, funny that nobody seems to have anything to say about the professionalism of a software whose name is pronounced "sky pee" while billionaire CEOs use it and refer to it all the time...)

It's a GNU tradition to use them

Only who knows nothing about GNU and free software could find it offensive


IBM: International Business Machines

IKEA: Ingvar Kamprad (the founder's name), Elmtaryd (the farm where the founder grew up), and Agunnaryd (the founder's hometown)

Skype: SKY PEer-to-peer

Yahoo: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle


I’m down voting because of that very reason, yes. And the needless edits to complain about the down votes; this isn’t reddit.


BTW we don't say "mamma mia" so much, in that way, maybe you should check what you think of other cultures, before getting offended for a software using the name GIMP

So the edit, yeah, was to prove a point: Americans can't accept that their culture is meaningless globally and their puritans problems have no significance for 95% of the World population.

This isn't Reddit, I known this is a circle jerk of people thinking they are better than redditors just because it's what you are supposed to think here.

On Reddit at least people don't downvote you without commenting on why


> maybe you should check what you think of other cultures, before getting offended for a software using the name GIMP

I have no idea what that has to do with my comment, I didn't say anything about that.

But even so, how does one offensive stereotype mean that something else, also offensive, should be dismissed as non-stereotypical?

If you feel so strongly about "mamma mia", then you should have no problem with other people feeling strongly about the implications of 'GIMP', regardless of its origin (which you haven't mentioned once; it's a film reference).

If you don't feel that strongly about people saying "mamma mia" as an Italian stereotype, naturally you would have no particular interest in GIMP. So why the passion and derision for those who do care?

I know why.

To throw in a cheap shot at Americans.

Disclaimer: I'm not American.

> Edit: but, as usual, judging from the immediate downvote Americans won't accept that they are only 5% of the World population...

> Americans can't accept that their culture is meaningless globally and their puritans problems have no significance for 95% of the World population

Your vitriol against Americans, as though anybody expressing an opinion with which you don't agree and speaks English must be American, speaks more to me about your position on this matter than anything else.

That's one reason I downvoted your comment.

> This isn't Reddit, I known this is a circle jerk of people thinking they are better than redditors just because it's what you're supposed to think here.

Actually, no. The reason I mentioned that this isn't reddit is because we have a set of community guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Second guideline from the bottom: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Because yeah, people getting upset about downvotes is dull. Moreso when it includes a needless dig at our users and American friends.

That's another reason I downvoted your comment.

> On Reddit at least people don't downvote you without commenting on why

Actually, they do. It's a well-known problem that people don't just downvote for content that they think is inappropriate or irrelevant, as per reddit's guidelines, but rather downvote content or comments with which they don't agree.

Heck, that was the motivation for hiding actual vote numbers a few years back. It's a known problem.

Besides, people on HN do tend to comment because constructive argumentation is generally encouraged by the community guidelines. So long as it leads somewhere.


> If you feel so strongly about "mamma mia", then you should have no problem with other people feeling strongly about the implications of 'GIMP', regardless of its origin (which you haven't mentioned once; it's a film reference

Pffff

That's some heavy twisting of my words

Or some kind of cognitive dissonance

I don't feel anything about "mamma mia", I feel that the people that invented a false stereotype, which is also offensive to many, because it's not representative of Italians just like Nazis are not representative of Germans, has no right to feel offended by something that is their own creation.

Stephen Frey gave the perfect definition of this behaviour

> It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what.

I pointed to Americans because they are the only ones who constantly whine about everything, not knowing that they are a very very very small part of the World population and their whines are insignifcant

They really can't understand it

Either because they are dumb or assholes is yet to be determined, but it's a fact.

Constantly lamenting that GIMP is offensive on every thread about GIMP or GTK or even something not directly related like someone posts "have you ever tried GIMP" or "that could be solved with some GIMP-FU", while it is actually not a problem for billion of people, is so annoying that I wish Colombo stayed home sick that day he left for the Indias.

> Actually, they do. It's a well-known problem that people don't just downvote for content that they think is inappropriate or irrelevant

That's because the majority of Reddit users read subreddits where the majority of commenters are American

It's just a bias towards the platform given by the fact that the majority of its userbase comes from the same country with the heavy social issues I was talking about fee paragraphs before.

I don't hang out with American redditors anymore, I only read subreddits of things I like that are not of interest to American general population and my opinion of Reddit completely changed

I also met a lot of Americans there who share this sentiment on their country and are sad of the state of the things, just we were when Berlusconi was an important politcal leader

HN, on the other hand, can't change because there's only one HN and you can't make your own sub HN


We've used it in visual fx houses since 1998, no one ever mentioned the name. Many folks don't even know the word, it's British I think.


Likewise. We've been using it in our company in a professional context for years. Coworkers who were introduced to it for the first time have never commented on or were offended by the name. Not a single one.

To those who keep complaining about the name: Do you think git's name should also be changed?


Yes, I do think it should be changed as well.


Fortunately, most don't.


GIMP devs and fans for 24 years when people bring the name up: "If you don't like the name, fork it."

What's the actual problem here?


Only a "woke" one really.


I know what each of these words mean individually but I have no idea what you're trying to say.


"Woke" is a colloquialism roughly analogous to "politically correct", not literally "awake" as in "woke up"; what they're trying to say (I assume, I'm not them or psychic) is that the problem is purely one of people manufacturing outrage over something innocuous, similar to eg, people claiming that using the standard Lena image for image compression examples is sexism.


This concern is older than this term and even older than this usage. What could "woke" as misused by the latest reactionary movement possibly have to do with it?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/woke-meaning-o...


I'm not sure I'd call social justice "reactionary", per se, but:

> What could [that sense of "woke"] have to do with it?

Because you asked (well, expressed confusion about) what sigzero was trying to say, and it's pretty clear that's the word-sense they were using?


offence has nothing to do with it for me. there's just a pretty good chance i will start being called the "gimp" around the office if i ever suggested it for something, so i never have


Do you work with a bunch of children?


I'm sure they'll change it once git changes theirs.


Or when Microsoft stops referencing Bill Gates privates.


Right

Because windows, word, pages, apple, oracle, chrome, snort, evil-mode, mongodb, cockroachdb (etc. etc.) are all great names that make you think of real professionals at work that infact failed because they are childish


What is with this mess?

    flatpak remote-add --user flathub-beta 
    https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo

    flatpak make-current --user org.gimp.GIMP beta
    flatpak make-current --user org.gimp.GIMP stable
Why isn't it just

    sudo apt-add-repository ppa:gimp/unstable
    sudo apt update && sudo apt install gimp
? Or:

    wget https://gimp.org/releases/gimp-2.99beta.deb
    sudo dpkg -i gimp-2.99beta.deb

?


Installing it through Flatpak here is actually fewer commands than your apt example.

You just run this to add the repository, > flatpak remote-add --user flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo

Then this to install it > flatpak install --user flathub-beta org.gimp.GIMP

The next two commands let you switch between the beta and stable branches, which is something apt can't do.


As someone not as involved, it's hard to follow why it's a mess.

The actual installation with flatpak also seems to use

flatpak install --user flathub-beta org.gimp.GIMP

and the make current is only for managing the active installation. From someone that has never used flatpak it doesn't seem more a mess than apt or the deb way in any way and also manages to have the unstable and stable version installed at the same time (which apt doesn't as far as I remember).

Am I missing some hidden problem besides that it's not available in the manager of choice?


I've been out of the loop for a while but I imagine this is because Flatpaks bundle all of the dependencies and thus you don't run a risk of the installation of one deb resulting in broken dependencies for other programs.




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