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Affinity Photo is SO much better and currently only $24.99. May be worth taking a look: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us

Affinity Photo is SO much better and currently only $24.99. May be worth taking a look: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

dharmab 6y ago
Affinity doesn't run on Linux, so it's not a replacement for GIMP as a Unix hacker's art tool. I like Krita (https://krita.org https://krita.org) as a painting tool. Darktable (https://www.darktable.org https://www.darktable.org) does photo editing, although I haven't used it myself.
dbspin 6y ago
Not sure why this is being downvoted. Gimp has a high learning curve and is primitive compared to contemporary commercial tools. I completely understand a disdain for Adobe's subscription model, but there are fantastic relatively low cost commercial options now. Open source is still a wasteland for actually usable video / audio and even photo editing applications. Lots of apps that are functional on paper, but have major workflow, file support or UX limitations that make them limited in practice. Edit: Guarantee not a single person downvoting this is an audio video or photography professional. This attitude of OSS above all, damn the users is likely part of the reason there aren't more viable creative apps for Linux, and more viable OSS creative apps overall.
- q3k 6y ago
  Not everyone who does light image editing as part of their professional setting needs professional tools straight away. The mental overhead of having to manage software installation, licensing, etc. is just not worth it, even if you're willing to spend the extra $300 per year for it. And as mentioned, Affinity/Adobe software is not available on Linux, which immediately disqualifies it for me personally, even though I'd like to upgrade past GIMP and I'm very much used to Photoshop after years of using it.
- katbyte 6y ago
  I would prefer to have photoshop but cost, however if the only alternative was gimp i'd throw all the money at them for my sanity. I use pixelmator pro instead and am quite happy with it.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  Especially in the context of workstation class systems where your looking at $5k per CPU and your quite possibly looking at 10g connections for your horizontal cable runs. At a certain point the old HP (before they where shit) Joke if you have to ask the price you cant afford it still applies.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    I think this fundamentally misunderstands how computer users work. Lets say I'm a programmer who needs to spin up multiple VMs / Docker / etc. etc. to properly emulate some server setup. Multiple cores and tons of RAM (more than 256GB) needed on a regular basis, with a few NVMe drives in RAID0 so that those VMs can be snapshot in blazing fast speeds. Paying $100 to $4000 for VMWare workstation, Visual Studio subscriptions, SQLServer non-express, Red Hat Virtual Machine License, Visio, and other such top-class tools would be 100% reasonable, along with the $10,000+ Threadripper pro computer with 512GB RAM or whatever. But image editing wouldn't be part of that user's workflow. Suddenly, the professional developer is asked to make a web-banner on the top of his Github document with the logo of the company on it. Guess what? Said developer probably is downloading GIMP. The hassle of going to corporate to be compensated for lol $25 on another image editor is just not worth the time.
- etiam 6y ago
  +1 for a lamentably rare correct use of the learning curve concept. As for the wasteland of usable OSS media applications, I think that's hyperbolic, but I agree the interfaces are often surprisingly poor in relation to the technical capabilities.
  - dbspin 6y ago
    Interface is a huge issue. It's easy to see why - there are certainly gifted individual devs in the open source space with design / UX chops. But in terms of involvement in community projects there's little incentive for UX people / design people (and appears to be little appreciation for their skills). In terms of the available apps, I think you may be blind to just how great production and editing apps are outside the OSS space for everything from audio production to vector design. Literally in terms of great OSS design / media apps there's VLC for consumption, and Blender. That's it. There is no usable OSS alternative with comparable functionality (let alone usability) in most of the categories used by professional (or even enthusiastic amateur) for most creative work. Those apps that do exist are decades out of date in terms of features and usability. It's as though the evolution of design language and user interface that took place after the release of the iphone never happened. Here's a simple analogy. Imagine an operating system where the only IDE was notepad or its equivalent. Writers could point at that and say, whats the issue it meets all my needs, you can absolutely code in it, its uses almost no memory, supports unicode etc etc. Programmers would rightfully find it completely inadequate because it's not suited to their much more specific, rich, evolved usecase. Similarly there's a complete blindness in OSS circles about how much better design / creative apps are in the rest of the computing world, and how little evolution there has been on these platforms in the OSS world, and how completely the available options fail to offer any of the functionality necessitated by a modern creative workflow for image creation, audio creation, video creation etc.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  > there are fantastic relatively low cost commercial options now. For example? As a Linux user I would love to pay for an intuitive image editor. Unlike what you suggest the problem is not the OSS attitude, it's that there's no alternative. Either way Gimp works well enough for my purposes. The UI could be a bit more robust, but it's not nearly as bad as some people make it out to be. For the sake of my blood pressure I'd rather use Gimp a day than MS Office for half an hour. At least Gimp's native file format is deterministic.
  - dbspin 6y ago
    With all due respect 'Gimp works well enough for my purposes' is the issue. Gimp does not work well enough for most professional image editing purposes, audacity doesn't work well enough for any professional audio purposes. But there's a kind of bizarre refusal to improve these programmes because they meet the extremely limited (and often baroque) use cases of their core developers and existing users. This seems to be a major issue with OSS overall. Local maxima. Added to which is the difficulty of attracting UX talent to an open source project, when there's no clear avenue of career reward for the design aspects of an OSS project (vs say the hiring and social honour kudos of being part of an OSS project for a dev). In terms of commercial alternatives available on Linux, your options are limited for the same reason that so many professional level graphics programmes are not available on Android. Linux users spend enormously less per desk on software, the balkanisation of the platform makes support difficult or impossible. Worse, unlike Android in the mobile space, Linux has so small a percentage of the desktop market that it likely isn't worth developing for (for commercial creative applications). If you think this situation is the fault of commercial app developers, you're exhibiting exactly the OSS snob attitude I was criticising.

Affinity Photo is SO much better and currently only $24.99. May be worth taking a look: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

dharmab 6y ago

Affinity doesn't run on Linux, so it's not a replacement for GIMP as a Unix hacker's art tool. I like Krita (https://krita.org https://krita.org) as a painting tool. Darktable (https://www.darktable.org https://www.darktable.org) does photo editing, although I haven't used it myself.

dbspin 6y ago

Not sure why this is being downvoted. Gimp has a high learning curve and is primitive compared to contemporary commercial tools. I completely understand a disdain for Adobe's subscription model, but there are fantastic relatively low cost commercial options now. Open source is still a wasteland for actually usable video / audio and even photo editing applications. Lots of apps that are functional on paper, but have major workflow, file support or UX limitations that make them limited in practice. Edit: Guarantee not a single person downvoting this is an audio video or photography professional. This attitude of OSS above all, damn the users is likely part of the reason there aren't more viable creative apps for Linux, and more viable OSS creative apps overall.

q3k 6y ago
Not everyone who does light image editing as part of their professional setting needs professional tools straight away. The mental overhead of having to manage software installation, licensing, etc. is just not worth it, even if you're willing to spend the extra $300 per year for it. And as mentioned, Affinity/Adobe software is not available on Linux, which immediately disqualifies it for me personally, even though I'd like to upgrade past GIMP and I'm very much used to Photoshop after years of using it.
katbyte 6y ago
I would prefer to have photoshop but cost, however if the only alternative was gimp i'd throw all the money at them for my sanity. I use pixelmator pro instead and am quite happy with it.
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
Especially in the context of workstation class systems where your looking at $5k per CPU and your quite possibly looking at 10g connections for your horizontal cable runs. At a certain point the old HP (before they where shit) Joke if you have to ask the price you cant afford it still applies.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  I think this fundamentally misunderstands how computer users work. Lets say I'm a programmer who needs to spin up multiple VMs / Docker / etc. etc. to properly emulate some server setup. Multiple cores and tons of RAM (more than 256GB) needed on a regular basis, with a few NVMe drives in RAID0 so that those VMs can be snapshot in blazing fast speeds. Paying $100 to $4000 for VMWare workstation, Visual Studio subscriptions, SQLServer non-express, Red Hat Virtual Machine License, Visio, and other such top-class tools would be 100% reasonable, along with the $10,000+ Threadripper pro computer with 512GB RAM or whatever. But image editing wouldn't be part of that user's workflow. Suddenly, the professional developer is asked to make a web-banner on the top of his Github document with the logo of the company on it. Guess what? Said developer probably is downloading GIMP. The hassle of going to corporate to be compensated for lol $25 on another image editor is just not worth the time.
etiam 6y ago
+1 for a lamentably rare correct use of the learning curve concept. As for the wasteland of usable OSS media applications, I think that's hyperbolic, but I agree the interfaces are often surprisingly poor in relation to the technical capabilities.
- dbspin 6y ago
  Interface is a huge issue. It's easy to see why - there are certainly gifted individual devs in the open source space with design / UX chops. But in terms of involvement in community projects there's little incentive for UX people / design people (and appears to be little appreciation for their skills). In terms of the available apps, I think you may be blind to just how great production and editing apps are outside the OSS space for everything from audio production to vector design. Literally in terms of great OSS design / media apps there's VLC for consumption, and Blender. That's it. There is no usable OSS alternative with comparable functionality (let alone usability) in most of the categories used by professional (or even enthusiastic amateur) for most creative work. Those apps that do exist are decades out of date in terms of features and usability. It's as though the evolution of design language and user interface that took place after the release of the iphone never happened. Here's a simple analogy. Imagine an operating system where the only IDE was notepad or its equivalent. Writers could point at that and say, whats the issue it meets all my needs, you can absolutely code in it, its uses almost no memory, supports unicode etc etc. Programmers would rightfully find it completely inadequate because it's not suited to their much more specific, rich, evolved usecase. Similarly there's a complete blindness in OSS circles about how much better design / creative apps are in the rest of the computing world, and how little evolution there has been on these platforms in the OSS world, and how completely the available options fail to offer any of the functionality necessitated by a modern creative workflow for image creation, audio creation, video creation etc.
alpaca128 6y ago
> there are fantastic relatively low cost commercial options now. For example? As a Linux user I would love to pay for an intuitive image editor. Unlike what you suggest the problem is not the OSS attitude, it's that there's no alternative. Either way Gimp works well enough for my purposes. The UI could be a bit more robust, but it's not nearly as bad as some people make it out to be. For the sake of my blood pressure I'd rather use Gimp a day than MS Office for half an hour. At least Gimp's native file format is deterministic.
- dbspin 6y ago
  With all due respect 'Gimp works well enough for my purposes' is the issue. Gimp does not work well enough for most professional image editing purposes, audacity doesn't work well enough for any professional audio purposes. But there's a kind of bizarre refusal to improve these programmes because they meet the extremely limited (and often baroque) use cases of their core developers and existing users. This seems to be a major issue with OSS overall. Local maxima. Added to which is the difficulty of attracting UX talent to an open source project, when there's no clear avenue of career reward for the design aspects of an OSS project (vs say the hiring and social honour kudos of being part of an OSS project for a dev). In terms of commercial alternatives available on Linux, your options are limited for the same reason that so many professional level graphics programmes are not available on Android. Linux users spend enormously less per desk on software, the balkanisation of the platform makes support difficult or impossible. Worse, unlike Android in the mobile space, Linux has so small a percentage of the desktop market that it likely isn't worth developing for (for commercial creative applications). If you think this situation is the fault of commercial app developers, you're exhibiting exactly the OSS snob attitude I was criticising.