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The GTK+3 port of GIMP is officially finished

310 points by marcodiego 4y ago

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
Just in time!
hannob 4y ago
I wasn't really aware that GIMP wasn't ported to the latest GTK+ version yet. This is a bit funny given that GTK originally stood for "GIMP Toolkit".
- pengaru 4y ago
  GTK+3 isn't the latest version either
- Synaesthesia 4y ago
  Yes that’s why it’s always been 2.x and now will finally go to version 3.
rwmj 4y ago
Time to start working on the Gtk 4 port? https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/index.html https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/index.html
- Liskni_si 4y ago
  Hopefully not. GTK4 deliberately removed support for subpixel font antialiasing, making fonts noticeably more blurry/ugly on non-HiDPI screens. There's a ton of FHD (1920x1080) or 1920x1200 screens out there that are perfectly fine for most usecases, but GTK4 turns them into landfill. :-(
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  Gtk 3.0 was released in 2011, the last 3.x release was supposed to be in 2016, but later 3.24 came along. 3.24 is now up to the 29th point release with 3.24.29. Kind of an OpenSSL 0.9esque version number... Meanwhile Gtk 2.0 from 2002 was apparently the first GTK+ version with the GObject system. I'm not sure if distros can stop shipping Gtk 2 any time soon, as it's quite commonly used in commercial software and not always vendored (since vendoring Gtk can be tricky).
  - chungy 4y ago
    > 3.24 is now up to the 29th point release with 3.24.29. Kind of an OpenSSL 0.9esque version number... It's just semver. Gtk 3 isn't receiving new features, so it's frozen at 3.24. It still gets bug/security fixes, so 3.24.x patch releases abound (and it seems the current version is actually 3.24.37). Similar situation with Gtk2, current version is 2.24.33.
    - TingPing 4y ago
      They slightly cheated and added some new features to 3.24.x to ease the transition and integrate into newer tech better like sandboxing.
  - asveikau 4y ago
    > Meanwhile Gtk 2.0 from 2002 was apparently the first GTK+ version with the GObject system Technically true but what I remember from Gtk+ 1.2 is that it had an object system that was a lot like gobject. It was more like gobject was factored out into its own library and given a new name and some different polish.
  - rleigh 4y ago
    Before 2.0 it was GtkObject. 2.0 just factored it out so you could use it for non-GUI code as well.
  - llothar 4y ago
    And Gtk3 was not useable for good quality apps until around 3.16 and Gtk4 just become useable with the recent 4.10 (fixing the ugly scrolling bug). Wisdom is to know that technology needs to ripe at least 5 years before they are useable, thats what i did to Swift and Kotlin too. While both SwiftUI, Jetpak Compose and WinUI3 are all way to young that i would even waste time at the moment to learn.
- phkahler 4y ago
  I'd like someone to move Solvespace to GTK4. It's platform specific code is all in one file (about 1K LoC). Uses a bare minimum of UI toolkit. https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/853 https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/853 You know, in case someone wants to get their feet wet in either GTK4 or Solvespace ;-)
  - somat 4y ago
    I love the solvespace ui, yes it's weird and different but it works well and is internally consistent, except when a gtk dialog jumps out at you, that is jarring and breaks the flow. I guess my point is. the obviously gtk bits of solvespace are it's worst parts, if I were a better ui programmer one of my goals would be to get rid of all the modal windows in solvespace, make them in line and operate like the rest of the native widgets.
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    I haven't tried but I imagine the LLM stuff might actually work well for these super-menial coding tasks of porting between related APIs compared to other coding tasks. There are usually a lot of "how do I port this snippet of code from version x.y to (x+1).y" on Q&A sites, forums, mailing lists etc. which is probably in the training data.
arbitrage 4y ago
I believe GIMP is the oldest F/OSS app I have used more or less continuously since I first logged into a Linux system decades ago. It's amazing how dedicated they are after all these years. Hats off to you, people involved with GIMP over the years ... your work has made a huge difference in many lives and careers.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Seconded. GIMP kicks serious ass, no matter what version of GTK it uses.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > I believe GIMP is the oldest F/OSS app I have used more or less continuously since I first logged into a Linux system decades ago. X (Xorg now), xterm, Gimp, Emacs... These guys were there when I started with Linux and I still use them to this day!
- idoubtit 4y ago
  I stopped using Gimp a few years ago because it made me lose data, and I could not find a way to work safely with Gimp. I was modifying several PNG images. Once I was done, I closed the window. As usual, Gimp warned me that I hadn't saved anything, since it considers that saving to PNG is not saving, it's just exporting. So I ignored the message, like always. It turned out I hadn't saved/exported an image, and I swore to use a saner application and never touch Gimp again.
  - doodlesdev 4y ago
    So: - You didn't save your file - You didn't export your file - You ignored GIMP's warning about it And somehow it's the program's fault? I guess they could implement some form of temporary autosave like some office applications do, but that comes with its own can of worms (i.e. stuff you really didn't want to save staying on your drive).
    - idoubtit 4y ago
johnchristopher 4y ago
So, what does a GTK+3 Gimp looks like ? Is it prettier/looks more integrated with Gnome ?
- copperx 4y ago
  I wish one day to share your optimism.
  - qtzfz 4y ago
    Right. I read "GIMP has been ported to GTK+3" and all I can think is "parts of it will look broken and using some dialogs will make it crash"
- bonzini 4y ago
  Theming should be more consistent.
  - rkeene2 4y ago
    Consistent with other GTK+3 apps, but less consistent if you're not using GTK apps a lot. But, GTK+3 support should bring HiDPI support.
    - ColonelPhantom 4y ago
      I'm on KDE, and GTK3 apps look better than GTK2 ones, because Breeze Dark is rather tricky to get working correctly with GTK2 on modern versions of KDE. GTK3 looks almost exactly native (down to window tinting), except that the current version of breeze-gtk seems to struggle a bit with client-side decoration (the minimize/maximize/close buttons that are integrated in the toolbar), making them for example too big. (It's a known regression and should be fixed in the next version, though.) GTK4 and the whole lack of libadwaita theming thing does look out of place though. But I use many GTK3 apps on KDE and they look near perfect. The only thing I can think of is some color-changes when gaining/losing focus are sometimes missing in Electron apps whose menu bar is themed via GTK3, iirc.
- 4y ago
jmclnx 4y ago
Nice to hear, congratulations and thanks for your hard work. Now time for gtk4 :( There was a time, when I was young, backwards compatibility was a big part of our job. To me, it seems every other day QT and GTK makes a point of ignoring backwards compatibility with their releases, making Application Development hard. I admit, I do *not* understand GTK/QT development model at all. But I think having that compatibility is one of the reasons of Linux's success, the rule of "Do not break user space".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mhd 4y ago
  > Now time for gtk4 Port it back to its original toolkit, Motif, now that that's open. Won't be needing an update after that ;)
  - orangesite 4y ago
    Given how many look&feel trends we've seen over the last few decades it would even look kinda cool&trendy in a postmodern-ish kinda way!
    - 2b3a51 4y ago
      Motif Window Manager (mwm) is very like twm but with nice regular sized colour icons and Alt-Tab already defined in the system .mwmrc. Very Windows 3 with iconised windows on the desktop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_Window_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_Window_Manager
- orra 4y ago
  > Now time for gtk4 :( Hopefully easier? Unsure however. > But I think having that compatibility is one of the reasons of Linux's success, the rule of "Do not break user space". Quite. Of course, it's a sometimes repeated joke that the Linux GUI toolkit with the most binary compatibility is the Win32 API (via Wine).
poulpy123 4y ago
Interesting to note that GTK3 was launched in 2011
- 1827162 4y ago
  And it was a huge step back from GTK2 at the time, taking ages to mature. Yes, the GNOME project is stagnating rather badly. Compare that with Qt, which is much better by comparison.
sylware 4y ago
https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html oooof...
- phkahler 4y ago
  I have that in checklist form on solvespace github here: https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/853 https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/853
  - marktangotango 4y ago
    Offtopic shoutout for solvespace, it is amazing! Is separating out the geometry code into a stand alone library on the roadmap at all? Or plans to incorporate the manifold library? https://github.com/elalish/manifold https://github.com/elalish/manifold
    - phkahler 4y ago
      If you mean the NURBS code, there are no plans to separate it for now. It does live almost entirely in the src/surf folder and does not depend on the sketch entities or constraint solver. My hope is to squash the remaining bugs in that code. I'm currently working on an issue with coincident and tangent surfaces. The constraint solver is available as a library and is currently used in FreeCAD assembly 3 workbench, as well as the Blender CAD Sketcher addon.
- jandrese 4y ago
  I'm a bit excited about the very last point. I always found the GtkTreeModel/GtkCellRenderer stuff hard to use. Hopefully the new system is less confusing. My first experience with trying to develop against Gtk4 (about a year ago) ran into an issue where none of the example programs in the Gtk repo worked. Apparently the details on how to actually get the program to pick up the now mandatory CSS file were not right? All it did was to convince me to stick with Gtk3 for the meantime.
  - 4y ago
Decabytes 4y ago
Davies Media Design^1 has the best Gimp tutorials I've ever seen on YouTube. So happy that a people are making such high quality tutorials for this tool. It makes it a lot easier to learn it 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L_MMU22bAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L_MMU22bAw
Spivak 4y ago
People saying that it's time to port to GTK4 are missing it. They've been on GTK2 for 20 years. They've got plenty of time on GTK3.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  And GTK4 is worse for complex desktop applications, more poorly documented, and is going to be deprecated even faster than GTK3 according to the GNOME devs. :D Rather switch to Qt tbh
  - em-bee 4y ago
    sounds like it would make sense to sit it out and wait for gtk5 https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK5-Likely-After-GTK-4.12 https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK5-Likely-After-GTK-4.12
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    > Rather switch to Qt tbh This a thousand times, although they would probably have to rename it Quimp:)
    - mdaniel 4y ago
      So, what you're saying is there are now two benefits, and only one "impossible to say over the phone" drawback but also hella easier to search for, so I guess three benefits
    - asddubs 4y ago
      might as well go for Kwimp then and become part of KDE
      - squarefoot 4y ago
        I'm not sure the dependency on a desktop manager would be a good thing.
        4y ago
1827162 4y ago
This is something I was actively resisting. It turns out that for me, I find GTK3 to be less aesthetically pleasing than GTK2. There are far fewer themes for GTK3, and they aren't as nice as the GTK2 ones either. Sad to see a step back in user interface design, in my opinion at least. It won't be long before all the distributions catch up and start removing the GTK2 builds, which are likely to be deprecated.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  Also because of the extremely irritating animations, which some found impossible to disable.
- llothar 4y ago
  Theming is a thing of the past. Unless it comes directly from the App Developer. The idea of general theming looking good is pretty stupid.
shmerl 4y ago
Port to Qt when?-) Semi-jokes aside, Gimp needs a better development model and more backing. Current pace of change with these kind of migrations is abysmally slow.
- stuaxo 4y ago
  Getting more backing like Blender has would be huge.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  If Krita got more "Photoshop" features this problem would be solved.
  - shmerl 4y ago
    I agree, there is a big intersection and Krita already has a better designed interface.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      It has a better name as well, and it uses a better GUI toolkit.
self_awareness 4y ago
Goodbye gtk2 :(
- mdp2021 4y ago
  I still compile for it. It gives me better results.
akasakahakada 4y ago
I hope they can make the function names shown in GUI be searchable in python command list.
dig1 4y ago
Gtk devs could learn much from projects like Linux, Windows, OpenJDK, Clojure, Emacs, or FLTK wrt backward compatibility. When Linus announced Kernel 5.0, it was "just another release" [1]. But, unfortunately, I'm getting the impression that Gtk and GNOME are run by teen boys who want to impress girls rather than get the job done. [1] https://itsfoss.com/linux-kernel-5/ https://itsfoss.com/linux-kernel-5/
- konart 4y ago
  >But, unfortunately, I'm getting the impression that Gtk and GNOME are run by teen boys who want to impress girls rather than get the job done. Why? Because they desided that new features\API\etc are more important (possibly for a good reason) than speding a great amount of time on maintaining compatibility? Sometimes you have to chose. PS: not to mention that number of contributors for Gtk and Linux (not to mention Windows lol) is quite different.
  - lallysingh 4y ago
    Desktop widget libraries aren't wide open spaces for innovation. What new features/APIs can they add that's worth porting an app from gtkN to gtk(N+1)?
    - emkoemko 4y ago
      fractional scaling? hidpi ? hdr etc ?
      - lallysingh 4y ago
        Why do any of those break existing code? Didn't win32 add those without breaking existing code?
        revelio 4y ago
        Not really. Win32 DPI scaling is a mess.
p1mrx 4y ago
Whenever I install Gimp, I have to remember this tedious sequence of steps: Edit > Preferences > Interface > Toolbox > uncheck "Use tool groups" Please make this the default! Who on Earth thought it was a good idea to hide the tools in an image editor?
- Forge36 4y ago
  I don't think I've ever set this setting. Did it change recent-ish? How does this change the UI?
  - p1mrx 4y ago
    screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/STMtkS0 https://imgur.com/a/STMtkS0 If I recall correctly, they started hiding the tools by default 3-5 years ago.
    - Jach 4y ago
      I also always go to Preferences > Interface > Icon Theme and change it back to Legacy, and the Theme to System (a light one for me). I really don't like the default dark theme and the lack of color in the icons. I suppose people who use it all the time just learn keyboard shortcuts. My casual usage for nearly 20 years though insists on being able to have the unvocalized thought process: "I need the eraser, so I'll click on the big pink eraser icon".
      - shmageggy 4y ago
        Holy shit, combined with the above that is infinity times better. Thanks.
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  In addition to this I always use the legacy icons, it's much more obvious what they mean. I find the symbolic ones impossible to use, and the modern color ones are only a slight improvement over that.
- 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
120photo 4y ago
Are non destructive layers a thing yet?
- homarp 4y ago
  https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-support-any-kind-of-non-destructive-editing-like-adjustment-layers-layer-filters-andor-full-blown-node-based-editing https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-suppor... "Currently the plan is to introduce non-destructive editing in GIMP 3.2. This is a huge change that will require rethinking the workflow and parts of the user interface." and https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#non-destructive-layer-types https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#non-destructive-lay... for more details
andrewstuart 4y ago
GIMP I don't understand the choice of name.
- mock-possum 4y ago
  Related: https://www.headbands.com/gspot/ https://www.headbands.com/gspot/
- jrm4 4y ago
  Every time I see something about it I'm usually compelled to make note of what a poor idea it has been to keep this name. There's a whole lot of proverbial water under that bridge, but I definitely think the choice to keep it has always been childish, ridiculous, and perhaps literally the greatest barrier that has kept it from being a much more serious competitor to Adobe stuff.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    ok. I'll bite. Sh looks like shut up. X looks like a porno venture. Gnome is not politically correct. Red Hat is communism. Daemons are satan's children. Where do we stop ? /s
    - jrm4 4y ago
      Again, I'm not talking about "being personally offended" or something like that, more the second order effects. Most everything you've named isn't something that meaningfully could be a big winner for free/open source, and also, none of those names are "as offensive" (again, I don't make the rules, and I don't personally care much either way. Here, I care about getting good software in the hands of mroe people) GIMP is a unique missed opportunity because zillions of people, way more than those who are "in tech," understand the concept of "Photoshop." I honestly believe the entire landscape of "photo-editing" could have been much better and open if this name was something less, well, publicly stupid. There is no way to me that the value of "keeping the name" is remotely close to the lost value of "way more people being able to use great and open software" here.
  - 4y ago
ww520 4y ago
That's excellent news. Does this mean GIMP would work well with high DPI monitor now? I.e. the text on menus and window titles won't be so small?
aap_ 4y ago
Ah too bad. The file chooser after GTK2 became absolutely unusable.
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  AFAIK GIMP does not use GTK's builtin file chooser, specifically because it lacked image thumbnails up until recently.
- superkuh 4y ago
  Yep. Ability to paste file paths (without invoking some other key sequence first) into the gtkfilechooserwidget.c remains broken in Gtk3 and Gtk4. Broken in the sense that you'll get an error message. They say Gtk3.x isn't frozen but it is when it comes to the gtkfilechooserwidget.c. They won't work on it and they won't accept fixes from outside sources.
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
Is it as good as Krita yet?
- somat 4y ago
  gimp is kind of a mess, something about being started as a university project many many years ago and being only halfheartedly maintained since. nothing wrong with that I love projects like that, but some people take offense. any way.... My understanding is that krita is a better painting tool. if you are drawing it will probably be the better experience. gimp is better at image manipulation(it is in the name) if you a modifying an already existing image it has better tools. Ether way it is not really the tool but what you do with it. there is this guy who does these amazing cut-away drawings for books, when asked what drawing program he uses the surprising answer was MS Paint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdKkR_lbLN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdKkR_lbLN0
- riidom 4y ago
  It's give and take. I think the crop tool is better in gimp than in krita, for example. Because in gimp, you can easily constrain to x by y pixels (absolute) or x by y ratio (relative) and it will stick to it no matter what. In krita you have something like "1.777777778:1" which looks bad imo, and you can somehow change it accidentally when dragging frames in viewport. But, just a single example.
- ColonelPhantom 4y ago
  Personally I've always preferred GIMP over Krita, but that's probably just because I rarely use either, and GIMP is "the devil I know". And I'm comfortable enough with it for the few tiny things I need to do (I'm decidedly not an artist!) that "the grass is greener" just doesn't apply.
m3kw9 4y ago
If they could just do one easy thing with a proper designer, that is to space out the tool icon, menu text better. Right now is too tight and looks like a 10 year old kids first pass at a tcl/tk app.
Humphrey 4y ago
Ironic that GIMP is still on an old version of the "GIMP Tool Kit"
- Zuiii 4y ago
  That's what happens when you break backwards compatibility.
brundolf 4y ago
Read this as GPT-3 and was trying to figure out what it means to "port GIMP to" an LLM

310 points by marcodiego 4y ago

Just in time!

I wasn't really aware that GIMP wasn't ported to the latest GTK+ version yet. This is a bit funny given that GTK originally stood for "GIMP Toolkit".

pengaru 4y ago
GTK+3 isn't the latest version either
Synaesthesia 4y ago
Yes that’s why it’s always been 2.x and now will finally go to version 3.

rwmj 4y ago

Time to start working on the Gtk 4 port? https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/index.html https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/index.html

Liskni_si 4y ago
Hopefully not. GTK4 deliberately removed support for subpixel font antialiasing, making fonts noticeably more blurry/ugly on non-HiDPI screens. There's a ton of FHD (1920x1080) or 1920x1200 screens out there that are perfectly fine for most usecases, but GTK4 turns them into landfill. :-(
formerly_proven 4y ago
Gtk 3.0 was released in 2011, the last 3.x release was supposed to be in 2016, but later 3.24 came along. 3.24 is now up to the 29th point release with 3.24.29. Kind of an OpenSSL 0.9esque version number... Meanwhile Gtk 2.0 from 2002 was apparently the first GTK+ version with the GObject system. I'm not sure if distros can stop shipping Gtk 2 any time soon, as it's quite commonly used in commercial software and not always vendored (since vendoring Gtk can be tricky).
- chungy 4y ago
  > 3.24 is now up to the 29th point release with 3.24.29. Kind of an OpenSSL 0.9esque version number... It's just semver. Gtk 3 isn't receiving new features, so it's frozen at 3.24. It still gets bug/security fixes, so 3.24.x patch releases abound (and it seems the current version is actually 3.24.37). Similar situation with Gtk2, current version is 2.24.33.
  - TingPing 4y ago
    They slightly cheated and added some new features to 3.24.x to ease the transition and integrate into newer tech better like sandboxing.
- asveikau 4y ago
  > Meanwhile Gtk 2.0 from 2002 was apparently the first GTK+ version with the GObject system Technically true but what I remember from Gtk+ 1.2 is that it had an object system that was a lot like gobject. It was more like gobject was factored out into its own library and given a new name and some different polish.
- rleigh 4y ago
  Before 2.0 it was GtkObject. 2.0 just factored it out so you could use it for non-GUI code as well.
- llothar 4y ago
  And Gtk3 was not useable for good quality apps until around 3.16 and Gtk4 just become useable with the recent 4.10 (fixing the ugly scrolling bug). Wisdom is to know that technology needs to ripe at least 5 years before they are useable, thats what i did to Swift and Kotlin too. While both SwiftUI, Jetpak Compose and WinUI3 are all way to young that i would even waste time at the moment to learn.
phkahler 4y ago
I'd like someone to move Solvespace to GTK4. It's platform specific code is all in one file (about 1K LoC). Uses a bare minimum of UI toolkit. https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/853 https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/853 You know, in case someone wants to get their feet wet in either GTK4 or Solvespace ;-)
- somat 4y ago
  I love the solvespace ui, yes it's weird and different but it works well and is internally consistent, except when a gtk dialog jumps out at you, that is jarring and breaks the flow. I guess my point is. the obviously gtk bits of solvespace are it's worst parts, if I were a better ui programmer one of my goals would be to get rid of all the modal windows in solvespace, make them in line and operate like the rest of the native widgets.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  I haven't tried but I imagine the LLM stuff might actually work well for these super-menial coding tasks of porting between related APIs compared to other coding tasks. There are usually a lot of "how do I port this snippet of code from version x.y to (x+1).y" on Q&A sites, forums, mailing lists etc. which is probably in the training data.

arbitrage 4y ago

I believe GIMP is the oldest F/OSS app I have used more or less continuously since I first logged into a Linux system decades ago. It's amazing how dedicated they are after all these years. Hats off to you, people involved with GIMP over the years ... your work has made a huge difference in many lives and careers.

JohnFen 4y ago
Seconded. GIMP kicks serious ass, no matter what version of GTK it uses.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> I believe GIMP is the oldest F/OSS app I have used more or less continuously since I first logged into a Linux system decades ago. X (Xorg now), xterm, Gimp, Emacs... These guys were there when I started with Linux and I still use them to this day!
idoubtit 4y ago
I stopped using Gimp a few years ago because it made me lose data, and I could not find a way to work safely with Gimp. I was modifying several PNG images. Once I was done, I closed the window. As usual, Gimp warned me that I hadn't saved anything, since it considers that saving to PNG is not saving, it's just exporting. So I ignored the message, like always. It turned out I hadn't saved/exported an image, and I swore to use a saner application and never touch Gimp again.
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  So: - You didn't save your file - You didn't export your file - You ignored GIMP's warning about it And somehow it's the program's fault? I guess they could implement some form of temporary autosave like some office applications do, but that comes with its own can of worms (i.e. stuff you really didn't want to save staying on your drive).
  - idoubtit 4y ago

johnchristopher 4y ago

So, what does a GTK+3 Gimp looks like ? Is it prettier/looks more integrated with Gnome ?

copperx 4y ago
I wish one day to share your optimism.
- qtzfz 4y ago
  Right. I read "GIMP has been ported to GTK+3" and all I can think is "parts of it will look broken and using some dialogs will make it crash"
bonzini 4y ago
Theming should be more consistent.
- rkeene2 4y ago
  Consistent with other GTK+3 apps, but less consistent if you're not using GTK apps a lot. But, GTK+3 support should bring HiDPI support.
  - ColonelPhantom 4y ago
    I'm on KDE, and GTK3 apps look better than GTK2 ones, because Breeze Dark is rather tricky to get working correctly with GTK2 on modern versions of KDE. GTK3 looks almost exactly native (down to window tinting), except that the current version of breeze-gtk seems to struggle a bit with client-side decoration (the minimize/maximize/close buttons that are integrated in the toolbar), making them for example too big. (It's a known regression and should be fixed in the next version, though.) GTK4 and the whole lack of libadwaita theming thing does look out of place though. But I use many GTK3 apps on KDE and they look near perfect. The only thing I can think of is some color-changes when gaining/losing focus are sometimes missing in Electron apps whose menu bar is themed via GTK3, iirc.
4y ago

jmclnx 4y ago

Nice to hear, congratulations and thanks for your hard work. Now time for gtk4 :( There was a time, when I was young, backwards compatibility was a big part of our job. To me, it seems every other day QT and GTK makes a point of ignoring backwards compatibility with their releases, making Application Development hard. I admit, I do *not* understand GTK/QT development model at all. But I think having that compatibility is one of the reasons of Linux's success, the rule of "Do not break user space".

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mhd 4y ago
> Now time for gtk4 Port it back to its original toolkit, Motif, now that that's open. Won't be needing an update after that ;)
- orangesite 4y ago
  Given how many look&feel trends we've seen over the last few decades it would even look kinda cool&trendy in a postmodern-ish kinda way!
  - 2b3a51 4y ago
    Motif Window Manager (mwm) is very like twm but with nice regular sized colour icons and Alt-Tab already defined in the system .mwmrc. Very Windows 3 with iconised windows on the desktop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_Window_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_Window_Manager
orra 4y ago
> Now time for gtk4 :( Hopefully easier? Unsure however. > But I think having that compatibility is one of the reasons of Linux's success, the rule of "Do not break user space". Quite. Of course, it's a sometimes repeated joke that the Linux GUI toolkit with the most binary compatibility is the Win32 API (via Wine).

poulpy123 4y ago

Interesting to note that GTK3 was launched in 2011

1827162 4y ago
And it was a huge step back from GTK2 at the time, taking ages to mature. Yes, the GNOME project is stagnating rather badly. Compare that with Qt, which is much better by comparison.

sylware 4y ago

https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html oooof...

phkahler 4y ago
I have that in checklist form on solvespace github here: https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/853 https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/853
- marktangotango 4y ago
  Offtopic shoutout for solvespace, it is amazing! Is separating out the geometry code into a stand alone library on the roadmap at all? Or plans to incorporate the manifold library? https://github.com/elalish/manifold https://github.com/elalish/manifold
  - phkahler 4y ago
    If you mean the NURBS code, there are no plans to separate it for now. It does live almost entirely in the src/surf folder and does not depend on the sketch entities or constraint solver. My hope is to squash the remaining bugs in that code. I'm currently working on an issue with coincident and tangent surfaces. The constraint solver is available as a library and is currently used in FreeCAD assembly 3 workbench, as well as the Blender CAD Sketcher addon.
jandrese 4y ago
I'm a bit excited about the very last point. I always found the GtkTreeModel/GtkCellRenderer stuff hard to use. Hopefully the new system is less confusing. My first experience with trying to develop against Gtk4 (about a year ago) ran into an issue where none of the example programs in the Gtk repo worked. Apparently the details on how to actually get the program to pick up the now mandatory CSS file were not right? All it did was to convince me to stick with Gtk3 for the meantime.
- 4y ago

Decabytes 4y ago

Davies Media Design^1 has the best Gimp tutorials I've ever seen on YouTube. So happy that a people are making such high quality tutorials for this tool. It makes it a lot easier to learn it 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L_MMU22bAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L_MMU22bAw

Spivak 4y ago

People saying that it's time to port to GTK4 are missing it. They've been on GTK2 for 20 years. They've got plenty of time on GTK3.

shrimp_emoji 4y ago
And GTK4 is worse for complex desktop applications, more poorly documented, and is going to be deprecated even faster than GTK3 according to the GNOME devs. :D Rather switch to Qt tbh
- em-bee 4y ago
  sounds like it would make sense to sit it out and wait for gtk5 https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK5-Likely-After-GTK-4.12 https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK5-Likely-After-GTK-4.12
- squarefoot 4y ago
  > Rather switch to Qt tbh This a thousand times, although they would probably have to rename it Quimp:)
  - mdaniel 4y ago
    So, what you're saying is there are now two benefits, and only one "impossible to say over the phone" drawback but also hella easier to search for, so I guess three benefits
  - asddubs 4y ago
    might as well go for Kwimp then and become part of KDE
    - squarefoot 4y ago
      I'm not sure the dependency on a desktop manager would be a good thing.
      - 4y ago

1827162 4y ago

This is something I was actively resisting. It turns out that for me, I find GTK3 to be less aesthetically pleasing than GTK2. There are far fewer themes for GTK3, and they aren't as nice as the GTK2 ones either. Sad to see a step back in user interface design, in my opinion at least. It won't be long before all the distributions catch up and start removing the GTK2 builds, which are likely to be deprecated.

mdp2021 4y ago
Also because of the extremely irritating animations, which some found impossible to disable.
llothar 4y ago
Theming is a thing of the past. Unless it comes directly from the App Developer. The idea of general theming looking good is pretty stupid.

shmerl 4y ago

Port to Qt when?-) Semi-jokes aside, Gimp needs a better development model and more backing. Current pace of change with these kind of migrations is abysmally slow.

stuaxo 4y ago
Getting more backing like Blender has would be huge.
still_grokking 4y ago
If Krita got more "Photoshop" features this problem would be solved.
- shmerl 4y ago
  I agree, there is a big intersection and Krita already has a better designed interface.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    It has a better name as well, and it uses a better GUI toolkit.

self_awareness 4y ago

Goodbye gtk2 :(

mdp2021 4y ago
I still compile for it. It gives me better results.

akasakahakada 4y ago

I hope they can make the function names shown in GUI be searchable in python command list.

dig1 4y ago

Gtk devs could learn much from projects like Linux, Windows, OpenJDK, Clojure, Emacs, or FLTK wrt backward compatibility. When Linus announced Kernel 5.0, it was "just another release" [1]. But, unfortunately, I'm getting the impression that Gtk and GNOME are run by teen boys who want to impress girls rather than get the job done. [1] https://itsfoss.com/linux-kernel-5/ https://itsfoss.com/linux-kernel-5/

konart 4y ago
>But, unfortunately, I'm getting the impression that Gtk and GNOME are run by teen boys who want to impress girls rather than get the job done. Why? Because they desided that new features\API\etc are more important (possibly for a good reason) than speding a great amount of time on maintaining compatibility? Sometimes you have to chose. PS: not to mention that number of contributors for Gtk and Linux (not to mention Windows lol) is quite different.
- lallysingh 4y ago
  Desktop widget libraries aren't wide open spaces for innovation. What new features/APIs can they add that's worth porting an app from gtkN to gtk(N+1)?
  - emkoemko 4y ago
    fractional scaling? hidpi ? hdr etc ?
    - lallysingh 4y ago
      Why do any of those break existing code? Didn't win32 add those without breaking existing code?
      - revelio 4y ago
        Not really. Win32 DPI scaling is a mess.

p1mrx 4y ago

Whenever I install Gimp, I have to remember this tedious sequence of steps: Edit > Preferences > Interface > Toolbox > uncheck "Use tool groups" Please make this the default! Who on Earth thought it was a good idea to hide the tools in an image editor?

Forge36 4y ago
I don't think I've ever set this setting. Did it change recent-ish? How does this change the UI?
- p1mrx 4y ago
  screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/STMtkS0 https://imgur.com/a/STMtkS0 If I recall correctly, they started hiding the tools by default 3-5 years ago.
  - Jach 4y ago
    I also always go to Preferences > Interface > Icon Theme and change it back to Legacy, and the Theme to System (a light one for me). I really don't like the default dark theme and the lack of color in the icons. I suppose people who use it all the time just learn keyboard shortcuts. My casual usage for nearly 20 years though insists on being able to have the unvocalized thought process: "I need the eraser, so I'll click on the big pink eraser icon".
    - shmageggy 4y ago
      Holy shit, combined with the above that is infinity times better. Thanks.
antibasilisk 4y ago
In addition to this I always use the legacy icons, it's much more obvious what they mean. I find the symbolic ones impossible to use, and the modern color ones are only a slight improvement over that.
4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

120photo 4y ago

Are non destructive layers a thing yet?

homarp 4y ago
https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-support-any-kind-of-non-destructive-editing-like-adjustment-layers-layer-filters-andor-full-blown-node-based-editing https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-suppor... "Currently the plan is to introduce non-destructive editing in GIMP 3.2. This is a huge change that will require rethinking the workflow and parts of the user interface." and https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#non-destructive-layer-types https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#non-destructive-lay... for more details

andrewstuart 4y ago

GIMP I don't understand the choice of name.

mock-possum 4y ago
Related: https://www.headbands.com/gspot/ https://www.headbands.com/gspot/
jrm4 4y ago
Every time I see something about it I'm usually compelled to make note of what a poor idea it has been to keep this name. There's a whole lot of proverbial water under that bridge, but I definitely think the choice to keep it has always been childish, ridiculous, and perhaps literally the greatest barrier that has kept it from being a much more serious competitor to Adobe stuff.
- hulitu 4y ago
  ok. I'll bite. Sh looks like shut up. X looks like a porno venture. Gnome is not politically correct. Red Hat is communism. Daemons are satan's children. Where do we stop ? /s
  - jrm4 4y ago
    Again, I'm not talking about "being personally offended" or something like that, more the second order effects. Most everything you've named isn't something that meaningfully could be a big winner for free/open source, and also, none of those names are "as offensive" (again, I don't make the rules, and I don't personally care much either way. Here, I care about getting good software in the hands of mroe people) GIMP is a unique missed opportunity because zillions of people, way more than those who are "in tech," understand the concept of "Photoshop." I honestly believe the entire landscape of "photo-editing" could have been much better and open if this name was something less, well, publicly stupid. There is no way to me that the value of "keeping the name" is remotely close to the lost value of "way more people being able to use great and open software" here.
- 4y ago

ww520 4y ago

That's excellent news. Does this mean GIMP would work well with high DPI monitor now? I.e. the text on menus and window titles won't be so small?

aap_ 4y ago

Ah too bad. The file chooser after GTK2 became absolutely unusable.

doodlesdev 4y ago
AFAIK GIMP does not use GTK's builtin file chooser, specifically because it lacked image thumbnails up until recently.
superkuh 4y ago
Yep. Ability to paste file paths (without invoking some other key sequence first) into the gtkfilechooserwidget.c remains broken in Gtk3 and Gtk4. Broken in the sense that you'll get an error message. They say Gtk3.x isn't frozen but it is when it comes to the gtkfilechooserwidget.c. They won't work on it and they won't accept fixes from outside sources.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago

Is it as good as Krita yet?

somat 4y ago
gimp is kind of a mess, something about being started as a university project many many years ago and being only halfheartedly maintained since. nothing wrong with that I love projects like that, but some people take offense. any way.... My understanding is that krita is a better painting tool. if you are drawing it will probably be the better experience. gimp is better at image manipulation(it is in the name) if you a modifying an already existing image it has better tools. Ether way it is not really the tool but what you do with it. there is this guy who does these amazing cut-away drawings for books, when asked what drawing program he uses the surprising answer was MS Paint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdKkR_lbLN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdKkR_lbLN0
riidom 4y ago
It's give and take. I think the crop tool is better in gimp than in krita, for example. Because in gimp, you can easily constrain to x by y pixels (absolute) or x by y ratio (relative) and it will stick to it no matter what. In krita you have something like "1.777777778:1" which looks bad imo, and you can somehow change it accidentally when dragging frames in viewport. But, just a single example.
ColonelPhantom 4y ago
Personally I've always preferred GIMP over Krita, but that's probably just because I rarely use either, and GIMP is "the devil I know". And I'm comfortable enough with it for the few tiny things I need to do (I'm decidedly not an artist!) that "the grass is greener" just doesn't apply.

m3kw9 4y ago

If they could just do one easy thing with a proper designer, that is to space out the tool icon, menu text better. Right now is too tight and looks like a 10 year old kids first pass at a tcl/tk app.

Humphrey 4y ago

Ironic that GIMP is still on an old version of the "GIMP Tool Kit"

Zuiii 4y ago
That's what happens when you break backwards compatibility.

brundolf 4y ago

Read this as GPT-3 and was trying to figure out what it means to "port GIMP to" an LLM