10 ms·

Gimp and Inkscape are both extremely sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in usability, Photoshop in both features and stability. Last time I tried to use Gimp

by nnq 9y ago

Gimp and Inkscape are both extremely sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in usability, Photoshop in both features and stability. Last time I tried to use Gimp for anything mildly complex (heavy usage of cage distort on a high res pic with quite a few layers) it crashed every 10min (though I was told it was the fault of the Ubuntu packaged, it's not acceptable to make a clusterfuck of the versions targetting the most widely used Linux distro!). Inkscape is horribly unstable once you try to draw anything slightly complex that involves heavy usage of masks and your number of paths/shapes get close/over 100. Its popular though since Cored Draw is no longer a thing, and Adobe Illustrator has horrible UX for anyone not using it full-time/professionally. Linux desktop desperately needs: 1. a good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities 2. a good vector graphics app - Inkscape could be it, but it would need heavy work on stabilizing it, and UI improvements around anything involving mask (though to honest the bar is low here, Illustrator has horrible UI around masking to) If anyone can do these things well, I'd suggest a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter or something. Lots of people will throw money at anyone who can produce something intuitive and stable! Not need for tons of features, just make it fast and stable, and someone will add on. And using a "hipster" new language like Rust would also help the project's popularity with new developers... few people are willing to hack on an open source project for the "fun" of improving their C/C++ skills nowadays...

whyever 9y ago
Not sure how serious you were, but AFAIK Rust's ecosystem for GUI programming is extremely immature. (Hopefully this will improve, seeing that the Gnome project is investing in Rust [1,2,3].) [1] https://github.com/GNOME/librsvg https://github.com/GNOME/librsvg [2] https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Rust2017 https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Rust2017 [3] https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Rust2017-2 https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Rust2017-2
- blattimwind 9y ago
  What point would there be in using Gtk/Gnome?
  - whyever 9y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean with your question. My point is that Rust's GUI ecosystem is improving due to investment of Gnome.
    - blattimwind 9y ago
      My point is that Gnome is not interesting for people interested in cross-platform GUIs.
      - drb91 9y ago
        Why would people building cross-platform guis care who funds the work?
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        Presumably GNOME is funding work to make Rust work better with GTK.
        drb91 9y ago
        Right, but that will only strengthen the language, even if you don’t use GTK. Also I thought GTK3 was pretty decent cross platform but I may be overly hopeful here.
  - nnq 9y ago
    Exactly! Most examples of horrible UI/X I can think of in Linux land are from the Gtk/Gnome camp. Qt seems to have much better UX/I sense, and some successful apps like Blender just use their own separate thing.
- nnq 9y ago
  > Rust's ecosystem for GUI programming One could just use OpenGL like Blender does to great success, maybe add something like Kivy on top. "Native feel" is not really the most desirable feature for a graphics app, especially since both (1) Linux users are used to non-native looking stuff (even Qt in GTK or the other way around is always at least a bit off) and (2) most native-looking apps, especially the GTK ones, have horrible UI/X, hence users don't tend associate "native looks" with "uuh, this is gonna be a smooth experience" (like Windows users are used to). (Also, anything that move people even the slightest bit away from Gnome and GTK is a win my book ;) They may feel like the standard now because of Ubuntu, but imho the people working these technologies are totally tone-deaf to what constitutes good UX/I and they are moving further and further in the totally wrong direction... Thank god we have KDE/Qt, and Xfce if you need some "retro but sane" experience in the Gtk camp.)
  - drb91 9y ago
    I’m not sure what problem you see OpenGL solving.
    - nnq 9y ago
      https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-GUI-library-used-in-creating-Blender-3d-software https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-GUI-library-used-in-creati... check out this explanation of how Blender's UI is implemented - same approach would make sense (maybe even reuse same "toolkit") here because you'd have "drawing code" in you app anyway, so why not use it to draw parts of the UI too, and you'd also want graphics card acceleration for some operations too
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    I feel neither of those statements is accurate. While Linux users may have had to put up with non-native stuff, that doesn't mean they like it. And using OpenGL to draw your UI has just made your task several orders of magnitude harder.
- zeth___ 9y ago
  If any project whats to have good UI just look at what gnome does and do the opposite.
hjek 9y ago
> 2. a good vector graphics app Check out Scribus. I'd describe it as more of a serious publishing app, where Inkscape may be more for artists. Scribus uses less resources and supports multipage documents. I've also had issues with the cage transform in Gimp, but it's fixed now, so if you're on Ubuntu, just add a PPA with the latest version of Gimp. > 1. a good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities I think Darktable does non-desctructive editing but I haven't used it myself. > Gimp and Inkscape are both extremely sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in usability, Photoshop in both features and stability. I think it's a bit sad to be whinging at those good pieces of free software for lacking features, and just recommend proprietary software instead. Surely, it is also the developers of the proprietary software that are causing this lack of features by not sharing their code for those. It also suggests you are willing to give up your freedom for a few extra features. What are those features missing in Gimp? (Gimp does have CMYK editing, if you install the gimp-plugin-registry package.) > Linux desktop desperately needs: Those non-free programs you mentioned can probably be run with Wine on GNU/Linux.
- nnq 9y ago
  TL;DR: A program needs either (a) features + good UX/I or (b) rock-solid stability + amazing performance characteristics to compensate for anything else lacking. Gimp has neither, it's some kind of "middle ground" thingy that annoys everyone. > give up your freedom for a few extra features Not really, I use like 10% max of Photoshop's features I guess. But those features simply feel perfectly implemented, they just f work. Heck, I even use it for vector graphics sometimes because it "just works" and feels more natural than Illustrator. And I'm not just used to PS. I actually liked Corel Photoshop more back in the day. And Inkscape has the same natural/intuitive feel to it after you use it a bit. Starts to crack once the complexity grows, but for starter it just works. Blender has a learning curve, but afterwards it also feels "natural" and "well built". Gimp is just bad at... everything: (1) performance feels horrible, like doing everything in slow mo compared to anything else (2) UI feels very inconsistent and has very weird concepts about the relationship between layers and selections and stuff like that (like "wtf is a 'floating selection' thingy doing in my layers panel? ...you get used to it, but boy it's weird), keyboard shortcuts don't work in all contexts (sometimes it feels like they randomly stop working) and (3) there's no easy way to reversibly do things like ad an adjustment/effect layer, turn effect on and of on a layer or some groups from the layers panel etc. I don't care about color space support or even mildly advanced features. And I could put up with a "weird" UI if I could find some logic or intuition for it. But at least stellar performance and stability would be requirements. If you can do things fast enough and things don't crash at 30 huge layers, even non-destructive edits cease to be a "must have" since you can just clone stuff like crazy and always have multiple "versions" of the "same" layer in the same doc. That's how lots of professional graphic designers use PS anyway. I was once handed a 20GB "trashcan psd" from a designer, and I hated every second of touching it, but it miraculously worked, relevant content was extractable, and the job got done. Honestly, its hard to say what's wrong with Gimp, because I can't figure out anything fully right about it. Even the fact that I'm comparing with Adobe Photoshop, a program itself known for horribly beginner-hostile and unintuitive (but in a weird way "learnable" and "natural") UI is a sign of how off things are.
vanderZwan 9y ago
> good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities RawTherapee and DarkTable are both excellent (I prefer DarkTable), and in some cases have much better plugins and algorithms than Adobe has to offer in Lightroom or Photoshop. Which one works best mainly depends on your preferred UI set-up, but I'd say they're easily at Adobe's level: http://darktable.org/ http://darktable.org/ http://www.rawtherapee.com/ http://www.rawtherapee.com/
mixmastamyk 9y ago
Swear I've read this exact comment on Slashdot back in '98, minus the Rust part. Why not assist a free project that needs help?
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  I don't think any of these apps are the way they are because of a lack of help. Specifically, GIMP's gui is the way it is because the leaders of the project want it that way.
- orionblastar 9y ago
  I donate 1 to 5 dollars to groups that do free and open source projects on the Internet. When I can afford to do so. I'm disabled and can't work a good paying job to afford the commercial alternatives. I am also forever a student in learning new things.
egypturnash 9y ago
I’m just going to note that Illustrator is thirty years old. While you do get the advantage of having a large feature set to imitate, rather than figure out from first principles, there’s still a ton of work there! Have fun implementing everything it can do from scratch in your “hipster” language that nobody is going to want to touch two years from now when everyone’s looking for excuses to work in the next hot new language.
- ehvatum 9y ago
  The next hot new worthless language is inevitably interpreted or built on the JVM. Always. Every single bloody time. Rust is a different animal. Firstly, it was conceived by a guy with the name Graydon Hoare, which is a very robust name. Nextly, it's already 8 years old. Finally, it's a fast, compiled language with excellent concurrency and safety. I still do all my HPC work in C++ with lots of template meta programming, but I'm a masochist. I'm confident that most coders do not actively gravitate towards suffering, although it would explain a lot if they did. You know what? Now that I think about it, I'm not confident about that, at all. Still, this new Krita release looks pretty sweet, even if it's not written in Rust. Good Lord, what are we even talking about, here?
ris 9y ago
> Inkscape could be it, but it would need heavy work on stabilizing it Stabilizing in what way? I did all the artwork for my last company over the course of ~6 years and can't remember the last time I had a crash. Debian packages.
amyjess 9y ago
> a good vector graphics app You'd honestly be surprised by what Aegisub can do. I recently got into fansubbing, mostly as a typesetter, and I'm honestly floored by some of the things I've been able to pull off. I can add text to scenes and make it look like it's part of the video... my favorite effects are the really subtle ones, and it always feels fulfilling whenever I pull something off. Rotation along the X, Y, and Z axes with the ability to place the origin point anywhere (even off screen!), shear on both the X and Y axes (so useful!), gaussian blur with the ability to blur the border separately from the text (blur is the single most important part about getting text to blend into an image, and it's also a great way to generate glow effects), clipping effects, etc. There's even a drawing mode to work with arbitrary shapes instead of text. And on top of that Aegisub comes with support for scripting effects in Lua, which helps smooth over some of the rougher spots. I think the next time I want to shoop some text onto an image, especially when I need to match blur and rotation, I might just convert the image to a short video, load it into Aegisub, typeset some text, and screenshot the video. Disclaimer: I freely admit that I'm a freak and that this probably won't be what most people want. But I find it amusing that a subtitling studio can actually do decent vector graphics, especially with text.
- ehvatum 9y ago
  Sword Art Online Abridged and Aegisub are evidence that top-flight engineering university anime clubs are collections of the most creative, intelligent, resourceful people to be found anywhere in this universe. Except possibly model railway.

by nnq 9y ago

whyever 9y ago

Not sure how serious you were, but AFAIK Rust's ecosystem for GUI programming is extremely immature. (Hopefully this will improve, seeing that the Gnome project is investing in Rust [1,2,3].) [1] https://github.com/GNOME/librsvg https://github.com/GNOME/librsvg [2] https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Rust2017 https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Rust2017 [3] https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Rust2017-2 https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Rust2017-2

blattimwind 9y ago
What point would there be in using Gtk/Gnome?
- whyever 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean with your question. My point is that Rust's GUI ecosystem is improving due to investment of Gnome.
  - blattimwind 9y ago
    My point is that Gnome is not interesting for people interested in cross-platform GUIs.
    - drb91 9y ago
      Why would people building cross-platform guis care who funds the work?
      - s73v3r_ 9y ago
        Presumably GNOME is funding work to make Rust work better with GTK.
        drb91 9y ago
        Right, but that will only strengthen the language, even if you don’t use GTK. Also I thought GTK3 was pretty decent cross platform but I may be overly hopeful here.
- nnq 9y ago
  Exactly! Most examples of horrible UI/X I can think of in Linux land are from the Gtk/Gnome camp. Qt seems to have much better UX/I sense, and some successful apps like Blender just use their own separate thing.
nnq 9y ago
> Rust's ecosystem for GUI programming One could just use OpenGL like Blender does to great success, maybe add something like Kivy on top. "Native feel" is not really the most desirable feature for a graphics app, especially since both (1) Linux users are used to non-native looking stuff (even Qt in GTK or the other way around is always at least a bit off) and (2) most native-looking apps, especially the GTK ones, have horrible UI/X, hence users don't tend associate "native looks" with "uuh, this is gonna be a smooth experience" (like Windows users are used to). (Also, anything that move people even the slightest bit away from Gnome and GTK is a win my book ;) They may feel like the standard now because of Ubuntu, but imho the people working these technologies are totally tone-deaf to what constitutes good UX/I and they are moving further and further in the totally wrong direction... Thank god we have KDE/Qt, and Xfce if you need some "retro but sane" experience in the Gtk camp.)
- drb91 9y ago
  I’m not sure what problem you see OpenGL solving.
  - nnq 9y ago
    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-GUI-library-used-in-creating-Blender-3d-software https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-GUI-library-used-in-creati... check out this explanation of how Blender's UI is implemented - same approach would make sense (maybe even reuse same "toolkit") here because you'd have "drawing code" in you app anyway, so why not use it to draw parts of the UI too, and you'd also want graphics card acceleration for some operations too
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  I feel neither of those statements is accurate. While Linux users may have had to put up with non-native stuff, that doesn't mean they like it. And using OpenGL to draw your UI has just made your task several orders of magnitude harder.
zeth___ 9y ago
If any project whats to have good UI just look at what gnome does and do the opposite.

hjek 9y ago

> 2. a good vector graphics app Check out Scribus. I'd describe it as more of a serious publishing app, where Inkscape may be more for artists. Scribus uses less resources and supports multipage documents. I've also had issues with the cage transform in Gimp, but it's fixed now, so if you're on Ubuntu, just add a PPA with the latest version of Gimp. > 1. a good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities I think Darktable does non-desctructive editing but I haven't used it myself. > Gimp and Inkscape are both extremely sub-par apps... Paint.NET beats Gimp in usability, Photoshop in both features and stability. I think it's a bit sad to be whinging at those good pieces of free software for lacking features, and just recommend proprietary software instead. Surely, it is also the developers of the proprietary software that are causing this lack of features by not sharing their code for those. It also suggests you are willing to give up your freedom for a few extra features. What are those features missing in Gimp? (Gimp does have CMYK editing, if you install the gimp-plugin-registry package.) > Linux desktop desperately needs: Those non-free programs you mentioned can probably be run with Wine on GNU/Linux.

nnq 9y ago
TL;DR: A program needs either (a) features + good UX/I or (b) rock-solid stability + amazing performance characteristics to compensate for anything else lacking. Gimp has neither, it's some kind of "middle ground" thingy that annoys everyone. > give up your freedom for a few extra features Not really, I use like 10% max of Photoshop's features I guess. But those features simply feel perfectly implemented, they just f work. Heck, I even use it for vector graphics sometimes because it "just works" and feels more natural than Illustrator. And I'm not just used to PS. I actually liked Corel Photoshop more back in the day. And Inkscape has the same natural/intuitive feel to it after you use it a bit. Starts to crack once the complexity grows, but for starter it just works. Blender has a learning curve, but afterwards it also feels "natural" and "well built". Gimp is just bad at... everything: (1) performance feels horrible, like doing everything in slow mo compared to anything else (2) UI feels very inconsistent and has very weird concepts about the relationship between layers and selections and stuff like that (like "wtf is a 'floating selection' thingy doing in my layers panel? ...you get used to it, but boy it's weird), keyboard shortcuts don't work in all contexts (sometimes it feels like they randomly stop working) and (3) there's no easy way to reversibly do things like ad an adjustment/effect layer, turn effect on and of on a layer or some groups from the layers panel etc. I don't care about color space support or even mildly advanced features. And I could put up with a "weird" UI if I could find some logic or intuition for it. But at least stellar performance and stability would be requirements. If you can do things fast enough and things don't crash at 30 huge layers, even non-destructive edits cease to be a "must have" since you can just clone stuff like crazy and always have multiple "versions" of the "same" layer in the same doc. That's how lots of professional graphic designers use PS anyway. I was once handed a 20GB "trashcan psd" from a designer, and I hated every second of touching it, but it miraculously worked, relevant content was extractable, and the job got done. Honestly, its hard to say what's wrong with Gimp, because I can't figure out anything fully right about it. Even the fact that I'm comparing with Adobe Photoshop, a program itself known for horribly beginner-hostile and unintuitive (but in a weird way "learnable" and "natural") UI is a sign of how off things are.

vanderZwan 9y ago

> good raster photo editor with non-destructive editing capabilities RawTherapee and DarkTable are both excellent (I prefer DarkTable), and in some cases have much better plugins and algorithms than Adobe has to offer in Lightroom or Photoshop. Which one works best mainly depends on your preferred UI set-up, but I'd say they're easily at Adobe's level: http://darktable.org/ http://darktable.org/ http://www.rawtherapee.com/ http://www.rawtherapee.com/

mixmastamyk 9y ago

Swear I've read this exact comment on Slashdot back in '98, minus the Rust part. Why not assist a free project that needs help?

s73v3r_ 9y ago
I don't think any of these apps are the way they are because of a lack of help. Specifically, GIMP's gui is the way it is because the leaders of the project want it that way.
orionblastar 9y ago
I donate 1 to 5 dollars to groups that do free and open source projects on the Internet. When I can afford to do so. I'm disabled and can't work a good paying job to afford the commercial alternatives. I am also forever a student in learning new things.

egypturnash 9y ago

I’m just going to note that Illustrator is thirty years old. While you do get the advantage of having a large feature set to imitate, rather than figure out from first principles, there’s still a ton of work there! Have fun implementing everything it can do from scratch in your “hipster” language that nobody is going to want to touch two years from now when everyone’s looking for excuses to work in the next hot new language.

ehvatum 9y ago
The next hot new worthless language is inevitably interpreted or built on the JVM. Always. Every single bloody time. Rust is a different animal. Firstly, it was conceived by a guy with the name Graydon Hoare, which is a very robust name. Nextly, it's already 8 years old. Finally, it's a fast, compiled language with excellent concurrency and safety. I still do all my HPC work in C++ with lots of template meta programming, but I'm a masochist. I'm confident that most coders do not actively gravitate towards suffering, although it would explain a lot if they did. You know what? Now that I think about it, I'm not confident about that, at all. Still, this new Krita release looks pretty sweet, even if it's not written in Rust. Good Lord, what are we even talking about, here?

ris 9y ago

> Inkscape could be it, but it would need heavy work on stabilizing it Stabilizing in what way? I did all the artwork for my last company over the course of ~6 years and can't remember the last time I had a crash. Debian packages.

amyjess 9y ago

> a good vector graphics app You'd honestly be surprised by what Aegisub can do. I recently got into fansubbing, mostly as a typesetter, and I'm honestly floored by some of the things I've been able to pull off. I can add text to scenes and make it look like it's part of the video... my favorite effects are the really subtle ones, and it always feels fulfilling whenever I pull something off. Rotation along the X, Y, and Z axes with the ability to place the origin point anywhere (even off screen!), shear on both the X and Y axes (so useful!), gaussian blur with the ability to blur the border separately from the text (blur is the single most important part about getting text to blend into an image, and it's also a great way to generate glow effects), clipping effects, etc. There's even a drawing mode to work with arbitrary shapes instead of text. And on top of that Aegisub comes with support for scripting effects in Lua, which helps smooth over some of the rougher spots. I think the next time I want to shoop some text onto an image, especially when I need to match blur and rotation, I might just convert the image to a short video, load it into Aegisub, typeset some text, and screenshot the video. Disclaimer: I freely admit that I'm a freak and that this probably won't be what most people want. But I find it amusing that a subtitling studio can actually do decent vector graphics, especially with text.

ehvatum 9y ago
Sword Art Online Abridged and Aegisub are evidence that top-flight engineering university anime clubs are collections of the most creative, intelligent, resourceful people to be found anywhere in this universe. Except possibly model railway.