alt text: Someone looking disinterested at their fingernails. "Me pretending that i dont care about convenience so i can use free software"
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Personally I find GIMP's design so poor that I would literally rather find a torrent and download Photoshop than try to do what I need in GIMP.
I'm not currently daily-driving Linux, but back when I was I'd have rathered torrent Windows and run Photoshop in a VM than put up with GIMP. That's how inconvenient GIMP is and how much better PS is.
Out of curiosity, what kind of work did you do with PS/GIMP?
Nothing professional. I'm a hobbyist Photographer. Most of my editing is in a DAM but I do occasionally break out PS. The most complicated thing I've done was creating a map (both faux-satellite and faux-handrawn) of my RPG world.
For me, free software is most often competing against pirated pro software, so free software's "free as in beer" component loses its advantage, and instead it becomes about the convenience of just downloading and running (as opposed to the inconvenience of pirating) versus the convenience of more-polished software (versus the inconvenience of often-poorly-designed software), with money not factoring into it. And with installing being a tiny fraction of the time interacting with the software, I choose the more-polished option every time. (And for me, the availability of this software is a big part of the reason I don't daily-drive Linux any more.)
It's what makes Audacity and new-MuseScore so great. They're not inferior-but-free options. They're genuinely great software in their own right.
I think GIMPs biggest issue is that it still doesn't have non-destructive editing with ajustment layers.
It's the single most useful feature any kind of editing software can have. Not being able to use that makes any project that is more than a low-effort shitpost incredibly frustrating.
I think Krita needs to be forked for an actual image manipulation software. I dont want Krita to veer from illustration, but IMO its a great base.