The best way to encourage adoption is to be miserable as fuck about every topic and event.

Because it’s made by volunteers, in their free time, who either don’t have the time or skill or goal to make it competitive

Didn’t stop Blender. Didn’t stop Firefox. Didn’t stop Linux itself.

If someone is not able or willing to learn their way around something new, that’s literally their problem

I’ve already covered in this comment chain. Krita and Affinity Photo do things differently and nobody complains because they can see actual value in the change. Being “different” isn’t the source of GIMPs reputation, being shit is.

Why would it need to be similar? If you want Photoshop, well then use Photoshop.

I moved to Affinity Photo over a year ago, despite it being different. I don’t even keep a token pirated version of Photoshop around for compatibility anymore.

Sometimes doing something different might also end up being the better idea. Won’t know until you tried.

I tried multiple times and it simply isn’t. That’s been their most common feedback for 20 years but people like you still refuse to acknowledge that people might have a point.

And yes, good software is good code. That’s just a fact.

Yet somehow, no matter how good the code might be, ugly software with shit UX just never seems to gain widespread popularity. Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s not because “good software” is holistic, it’s because the entire world is wrong about GIMP except for you.

It is the next best completely free alternative.

And if that was how people actually presented it, I wouldn’t be objecting. Instead, people pretend it’s as good as Photoshop and anyone who disagrees is blamed for not programming it themselves and attacked for suggesting that commercial tools are far better.

How is that an argument? How do you get the idea that GIMP is basically required to be competitive, just because it’s old?

Looks like you’re more interested in defending Linux software than actually seeing my point.

So why isn’t it competitive? It’s not because it’s new and hasn’t had time to mature. It’s not because developers haven’t put time into it (despite the ridiculous “fix it yourself” bullshit that people keep pushing). It’s not because the problem it aimed to solve has been solved.

It’s because the people involved with GIMP have the usual Linux community resentment about what “good software” actually is. It’s fuck ugly, but they don’t think that should matter, so it doesn’t get addressed. It doesn’t follow patterns that similar software follows, because they’re used to it, so everyone else should be too.

It’s the same pervasive “good software is good code and nothing else” mentality the plagues the OSS community.

But who cares? Use your shit software. Defend it to your dying breath. It’s not going to fix systemic problems with the project nor fool anyone who actually tries it.

Nobody is acting shocked. Least the people who learned to use GIMP.

So the people who learn GIMP are fully aware why it gets zero industry use? Thanks, that was my point.

The problem is people like you who are outraged, when asking for a free Photoshop alternative, that the next best thing is not to their likening.

I’m not outraged in the slightest, nor am I asking for a free Photoshop alternative. But I’ve seen people claiming GIMP is a viable alternative to Photoshop for 20 years and for anything past the most basic use cases, it isn’t. You may as well be telling people to use Nano instead of Visual Studio and when they complain about the experience, tell them to code the features themselves.

GIMP has had literally decades of development and even with Photoshop in the worst state it’s ever been in, it isn’t competitive. There are clearly systemic issues with the project and I’m certain this “head in the sand” mentality is at least partly to blame.

No, but “fix it yourself” is apparently a completely acceptable response if someone criticizes GIMP.

Anyway, I don’t care how bad the tools you use are, but it’s time to stop acting shocked when industry professionals have no interest in GIMP and don’t take anyone who advocates it as a Photoshop alternative seriously.

To add to this, it’s not like other apps have just blindly copied Photoshop. Affinity Photo has shape tools that are far less convoluted than Photoshop but they still feel instantly familiar.

Even when they couldn’t stick to common patterns (such as the eyedropper tool) they still manage to communicate how the feature works just by designing intelligently, no Googling required.

But every time I’ve used gimp, common tasks feels like a collection of workarounds for missing features. Someone elsewhere in this thread asked how to place an ellipse and got told that wasn’t something commonly needed but to make a selection and fill it using the paint bucket tool (and a modifier key).

That solution is jankier than MS Paint, which at least offers you an actual tool and a short period where you can make non-destructive modifications to the stroke, fill, size and position.

But since you’ve technically got the circle you asked for, it’s treated as “people who don’t like GIMP are just haters” rather than “people don’t want to use bad tools for their job”

Have you thought about applying for a job at Adobe and fixing it?

GIMP is bad. If the problem was simply that it was “different to PS” then other apps like Krita and Affinity Photo would have the same reputation.

If a user goes looking for a tool or feature and it’s not in the first place they look, that’s a problem of “didn’t really practice that much”. If experienced people need to look up how to do basic operations and their reaction is “that’s fucking stupid”, then the software is bad.

To then say “well why don’t you help the Dev team then” is insane. I’m not spending hundreds of hours digging GIMP out of bad design decisions when I could just use better software and I haven’t seen any evidence that my PR would even be accepted.

Nobody needs excuses and apologism, they need Blender for image editing and GIMP just isn’t that.

Whatever happened to “you do you, I do me”?

Literally the sentence before that one was you being critical of pride parades, so I guess you mean “You do you (but only with my rubber stamp of approval)”

Shocking nobody.

You’re really bad at staying mask on.

Sure. “It happened to a friend”.

Okay Gamer.

This situation doesn’t exist outside your imagination.

“Thanks for pushing normal people to the far-right” is an overt strategy passed around 4chan and far-right chat channels, intended to both discourage the left from defending their views and create the idea that being bigoted is something “normal people” support.

The far-right is not the Democrats fault and I don’t know why you’re bragging about selling out your community.

The Republican culture war being waged against the LGBT+ community should make it completely clear that your skin color or brand of religious nonsense doesn’t make you immune to bigotry.