As a consumer image editing program? GIMP is more than sufficient. I think the UI is too complex for its capabilities (paint.net is a much better middle ground), but it is pretty consistent for providing that “better than MS paint” that most people need. Where the UI/UX falls apart is when you are applying significantly more complex shaders/morphs/transforms and… that is also where GIMP largely demonstrates how completely inferior it is to photoshop and the like.
Which is generally the issue with a lot of the popular linux software (and I say this as a linux user/lover). The UI/UX is arguable for the quality (GIMP and Blender are pretty consistent once you think the right way. FreeCAD is a god damned mess) but… it just doesn’t compare at all to the industry standard tools and there are reasons nobody who “does this for a living” uses these tools (and no, I don’t mean a kid who does graphic design for local websites where his mom knows the owner).
Personally? I love GIMP. But the majority of image editing I do is futzing with color schemes, resizing/cropping, converting, and removing metadata. It gives me the power to make a really funny spray at a LAN party but… yeah.
Its not even (just) the UI. It is the outright capabilities. Like with a lot of these kinds of tools, photoshop is… kind of freaking insane in its capabilities. Which is why it is so funny to hear the art/graphics community talk about how “AI can’t do our jobs” when so many of the tools they rely on are AI based.
A good, linux friendly, answer (that also kind of highlights the issue but…) is to compare nano versus vim/emacs. For 99% of people, nano is just as capable and arguably better in a lot of cases. But if you want something that is closer to an IDE/operating system, you are looking at vim/emacs.
Or, one that is less contrived: if you are writing a letter or even a short report, MS Word/Libre Write (?)/Google Docs is perfectly suitable and, arguably, a lot better. If you are writing a scholarly article or even a book? You want something where typesetting is a first class citizen and that means Latex or whatever the publishing industry likes. There are ways to set up references and figures correctly in a WYSIWYG rich text editor like MS Word but… it is very much not the same thing and you are spending a lot of time trying to pretend you are using the right tools.
Thank you for mentioning and subsequently introducing this to me. Definitely a nice modification of GIMP. I’m used to GIMP’s interface from years of use, but this is simply much more intuitive.
As a consumer image editing program? GIMP is more than sufficient. I think the UI is too complex for its capabilities (paint.net is a much better middle ground), but it is pretty consistent for providing that “better than MS paint” that most people need. Where the UI/UX falls apart is when you are applying significantly more complex shaders/morphs/transforms and… that is also where GIMP largely demonstrates how completely inferior it is to photoshop and the like.
Which is generally the issue with a lot of the popular linux software (and I say this as a linux user/lover). The UI/UX is arguable for the quality (GIMP and Blender are pretty consistent once you think the right way. FreeCAD is a god damned mess) but… it just doesn’t compare at all to the industry standard tools and there are reasons nobody who “does this for a living” uses these tools (and no, I don’t mean a kid who does graphic design for local websites where his mom knows the owner).
Personally? I love GIMP. But the majority of image editing I do is futzing with color schemes, resizing/cropping, converting, and removing metadata. It gives me the power to make a really funny spray at a LAN party but… yeah.
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Its not even (just) the UI. It is the outright capabilities. Like with a lot of these kinds of tools, photoshop is… kind of freaking insane in its capabilities. Which is why it is so funny to hear the art/graphics community talk about how “AI can’t do our jobs” when so many of the tools they rely on are AI based.
A good, linux friendly, answer (that also kind of highlights the issue but…) is to compare nano versus vim/emacs. For 99% of people, nano is just as capable and arguably better in a lot of cases. But if you want something that is closer to an IDE/operating system, you are looking at vim/emacs.
Or, one that is less contrived: if you are writing a letter or even a short report, MS Word/Libre Write (?)/Google Docs is perfectly suitable and, arguably, a lot better. If you are writing a scholarly article or even a book? You want something where typesetting is a first class citizen and that means Latex or whatever the publishing industry likes. There are ways to set up references and figures correctly in a WYSIWYG rich text editor like MS Word but… it is very much not the same thing and you are spending a lot of time trying to pretend you are using the right tools.
Thank you for mentioning and subsequently introducing this to me. Definitely a nice modification of GIMP. I’m used to GIMP’s interface from years of use, but this is simply much more intuitive.