OT, but something I've been wondering for a while:
Why, WHY is it called "The GIMP"? I mean, I understand the acronym. I understand that nerds in general (such as myself) are the kind of folks who look past names and appearances and judge just about everything on its content.
But whenever I attempt even explain the benefit of linux to a layperson, inevitably the user's need to "run apps like Photoshop" will come up. And inevitably, I'll tell them that there's a similar program that's entirely free, which they become excited about. Then I tell them the name and they immediately make quite a number of assumptions.
The name sounds amateurish and unstable. It sounds like some Windows freeware that installs a toolbar or two, not a powerful image editor or a real alternative to something called Photoshop.
And don't get me wrong, I think the software itself is great and I use it constantly! But for software, just like any product, image and impression are quite important.
The GIMP started off as a college project, and I'm guessing that the name was a product of youthful cleverness combined with no expectations that it would ever become a widely-used open source project.
As far as why it's still named that nearly 20 years later, there are lots of decent potential reasons and a couple bad ones. Branding and a loss of mindshare is a concern, as anyone who watched the early days of Firefox (or Phoenix, or Firebird, or...) could tell you. It's also a fair bit of work if you want to actually change the name everywhere and not have all the code break spectacularly. Naturally, there's also the chance that the maintainers just don't care. It's easy to write off people who are offended or express dislike for the name as the overly-sensitive political correctness police, and I've seen many people (although none in an official position afaik) do so in previous discussions like this.
> Naturally, there's also the chance that the maintainers just don't care. It's easy to write off people who are offended or express dislike for the name as the overly-sensitive political correctness police, and I've seen many people (although none in an official position afaik) do so in previous discussions like this.
I've had a close call of being banned from an IRC channel after mentioning the Brain Fuck Scheduler (a different task scheduler for linux), when there was a 'family friendly' policy with no swearing. I assumed that the no swearing part of that rule was more contextual, but it turned out to be a zero tolerance policy.
This is a frequent problem in open software projects. There are countless applications out there where the name has absolutely nothing to do with the functionality of the program (or it does, but only if you understand some geeky reference).
Not to mention that these names have a habit of changing often too when being forked etc.
I've often read recommendations where people will something like 'Gimp is not as user friendly but a fair alternative if you can't afford to drop the $$$ that Photoshop costs'.
Having never used Photoshop I can't comment on how they compare but this type of comment did make me feel nervous about using Gimp and even probably negatively affected my progress in learning to use it.
Now, having used Gimp a reasonable amount I think it's about as easy to use as such a feature rich program can be expected to be.
Unfortunately because it's a program that I don't use very often, there tends to be a lot forgotten each time I return to it.
I have the same problem, GIMP is not particularly intuitive.
The other issue is that it's possible to find thousands of tutorials online in how to do pretty much anything in Photoshop, but not so much with GIMP.
GIMP needs to decide between trying to be a full photoshop replacement, or deciding to worry less about features and make itself super intuitive for graphics newbies.
For me, the only thing missing in GIMP to be a viable competitor with Photoshop is support for layer styles.
I realize you can do almost all of the effects that Photoshop's layer styles offer, with some workarounds in GIMP, but it's not the same. The easiness of just ticking a few checkboxes, choosing either drop shadow or gradient overlay, playing with the parameters and seeing the result real time... plus then coming back to the dialog to tweak some parameters.... is so much better than the gimp way (applying a filter, clicking undo, writing down what you had in the filter in case you need to rerun it with slightly different parameters, etc).
People without experience who wonder "What's the big deal? You can do all the same things. Do you need some fancy interface to add bling-bling to your images?" are missing the point. Making some of the more common operations as easy and as that saves a ton of time for example when creating web sites. For drop shadows in GIMP I have to move around two layers and re-run the filter if I need to change some parameters of the shadow. In Photoshop I just click the "put a drop shadow on this layer" checkbox. That's saving my time and letting me focus on what's essential.
Before GIMP gets support for these layer styles, it is, in essence, a fancy tool for cropping images. At least for me. Photoshop is used for the real work.
Plus, the plugins to convert Photoshop layers to CSS are additional time savers. For example CSS Hat: http://csshat.com/ (I'm not affiliated).
I hate to say this, but that doesn't look very well designed. Every opportunity should be one to show how you can create gorgeous designs with the GIMP.
I'm surprised somewhat that nobody has come up with a commercial alternative to the GIMP.
Something that is low cost (compared with photoshop), it doesn't need all the functionality of photoshop. It just needs enough functionality for the people who say "I would switch to Linux but I want photoshop" , I imagine most of these people are not using all the photoshop features anyway.
Something like a port of PixelMator could potentially make a killing on the ubuntu app store.
I don't know, look at (for example) the excitement around the news of Steam for Linux as well as stuff like Linux Humble bundle purchases. I think most Linux users would welcome having polished commercial software available in addition to open source software. Ubuntu seems to be betting on this for one.
The "Free as in Richard Stallman" crowd seem to be a minority of Linux users.
Assuming these people are paying for Photoshop on Windows , would they not consider buying equivalent Linux software?
Not to mention that extra software in these areas can bring in a very different category of users.
As for proprietary Linux software, I'm a delighted user of SoftMaker Office, Corel WordPerfect, NoteCase Pro, Realsoft 3D... All superb software; and why shouldn't the authors be recompensed for their efforts? (OK, excluding WordPerfect ;-)
Proprietary doesn't necessarily mean unfriendly...
@mariusandra layer styles and smart objects are what I need for real work.
Gimp 2.8 is a big improvement though, for sure.
So, according to the articfle, if the magazine is complete and will be digital, why not release it now instead of Fall. why make the world wait for a periodical? For more ad space I suppose.
Why, WHY is it called "The GIMP"? I mean, I understand the acronym. I understand that nerds in general (such as myself) are the kind of folks who look past names and appearances and judge just about everything on its content.
But whenever I attempt even explain the benefit of linux to a layperson, inevitably the user's need to "run apps like Photoshop" will come up. And inevitably, I'll tell them that there's a similar program that's entirely free, which they become excited about. Then I tell them the name and they immediately make quite a number of assumptions.
The name sounds amateurish and unstable. It sounds like some Windows freeware that installs a toolbar or two, not a powerful image editor or a real alternative to something called Photoshop.
And don't get me wrong, I think the software itself is great and I use it constantly! But for software, just like any product, image and impression are quite important.