r/pcmasterrace • u/Away-Huckleberry9967 • 1d ago

Meme/Macro Let's check it out on Github

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u/needlesfox 1d ago

I am sure that eventually photo craft will become better than PS though as is the case with open source.

Look, I'm a big fan of open source projects, but GIMP is an open source Photoshop competitor that has been around for almost three decades, and it is harder to use and substantially less capable than PS. Being open source doesn't magically make something good, or mean it'll take over the industry, and there are really only a handful of cases where that's actually wound up being the case.

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u/TwoPicklesinaCivic 1d ago

Yup. I tried a few competitors to get out of Lightroom subscriptions and they were all painful.

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u/ThankGodImBipolar 1d ago

GIMP is an open source Photoshop competitor that has been around for almost three decades, and it is harder to use and substantially less capable than PS

GIMP is the way that it is because GIMP users like it, not because it'd be impossible to clone the UX of Photoshop. I don't actually use GIMP, but there's a comment that reads something like "GIMP is actually really easy to use and makes more sense than Photoshop," under every comment like this.

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u/porkminer 1d ago

A few thoughts on this. First, GIMP looks the way it does because very little actual design and usability thought went into it. Developers put stuff wherever they thought it should go and that became the canonical location for it.

Second, modern GIMP is light-years better UI than it used to be.

Third, it also depends on what you learned. I used GIMP long before I ever touched Photoshop so I understand it better. Working in Photoshop is harder for me than GIMP.

Fourth, even with that being said I still think GIMP needs some professional UI/UX designers to dedicate major time to overhauling it.

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u/WorkTropes 1d ago

Absolutely, going from Photoshop to gimp is really difficult and it's quite jarring. I tried and failed.

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u/porkminer 1d ago

I felt the same way in the other direction. That's not to say that I think GIMP has a good UI, it's just what I'm used to.

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u/thebornotaku 3600XT / RTX 4070 Ti Super / 32GB DDR4-3600 / TUF X570-Plus 1d ago

Same. I do have access to a legit CC subscription but I daily linux. I needed to do some fairly simple graphics editing. I could not fucking figure out GIMP. I had an easier time figuring out how to set up a windows VM so I could install Photoshop CC on that and use it instead.

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u/tanstaafl90 22h ago

There's a UI plugin to make it more Photoshop like called PhotoGIMP.

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u/needlesfox 1d ago

Third, it also depends on what you learned. I used GIMP long before I ever touched Photoshop so I understand it better. Working in Photoshop is harder for me than GIMP.

I had a different experience from you and others in this thread. I started editing in GIMP and struggled a lot with it. I could get things done, but very slowly, and the results were often not... great. After about a year, I switched to Photoshop and, within about a week, had surpassed where I'd gotten to with GIMP.

This was, to be fair, almost a decade ago, though the last time I tried GIMP I still ran into a lot of the frustrations I'd had initially, though they were now compounded by the fact that I was used to how Photoshop did it, too.

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u/Grupdon 1d ago

Yeah not everything needs to emulate tge "popular" program

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u/Farranor ASUS TUF A16... 1 year of hell 1d ago

"Popular bad, unpopular good" is a fine mindset for a 14-year-old trying to develop their own sense of fashion, but in software development it's a recipe for disaster. Photoshop is popular (no scare quotes needed) because it's the best option.

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u/Grupdon 18h ago

Kek

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u/Farranor ASUS TUF A16... 1 year of hell 12h ago

GIMP is bad.

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u/lord_hydrate Laptop | i5 9300h | nvidia geforce gtx 1650 | 32gb ddr4 1d ago

Fundamentally the problem comes down to most people are allergic to change, and i dont necessarily mean this to put anyone down. The human brain us a tool for learning things but not unlearning things, unlearning habits and expectations causes actual measurable distress in subjects when tested, i personally enjoy gimp and find it fairly intuitive, ive also never actually used photoshop in the first place im sure id have the inverse learning problem that anyone coming from photoshop has

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u/nachtengelsp Desktop | i7-11700k | 4070 Super | 64Gb DDR4 1d ago

A "change" can also be for worse just as can be for better. Even Photoshop UI didn't change much (I'm affirming it because I've been using it since 6.0).\ \ I also used GIMP and I say to you... If you think it's fairly intuitive, PS is a bit more

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u/Fart_Tounge_5609 1d ago

Gimp changed its interface a few years ago, now its fucking unusable. Nothing worse than software that changes under you. I learnt it once, but they had to ruin that. Why would I keep using it? It'll only change again, and all my effort is wasted again.

Fuck Gimp, and any software that changes for the sake of change. The best UI is the one you already know, and the worst is the one that changes.

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u/Typical_Research_877 16h ago

gimp is total dogshit

source: designer for 21 years

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u/gbeegz 1d ago

GIMP is actually really easy to use and makes more sense than Photoshop. At least for me, I've used both and still do occasionally depending on the project needs. But no way in hell do I pay for it ;)

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u/MegaMoah 1d ago

Sadly true... same case for librewriter vs word/docs, had a very nad experience

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u/FelbrHostu 1d ago

I’ve been a big fan of LibreOffice since its inception. But that might be just because I followed it from the old Star Office until it became OpenOffice, and finally forked into LibreOffice. It’s got a pedigree that goes way back, and I think it tops MS Office in UI/UX.

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u/MegaMoah 1d ago

Have you by chance tried collabora office? Idk someone recommended it to me when I complained once and never tried it

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u/wReckLesss_ Desktop 1d ago

Agree, LibreOffice is great. I've used it for 20+ years and have never once needed the MS suite because of something LibreOffice couldn't do.

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u/TemporaryTax419 1d ago

Tried LibreOffice one, it kept crashing for me over and over again

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u/Schmigolo 1d ago

GIMP is shit because of the UI and all, not because it's janky. All this project has to do is become not janky and it's golden.

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u/Neirchill 1d ago

All it has to do is not become janky, it's only had 28 years

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u/needlesfox 1d ago

I mean, sure, but you've basically said "All this project has to do is [the actual hard part]"

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u/kilgore_trout8989 1d ago

and there are really only a handful of cases where that's actually wound up being the case.

Seems to be accelerating lately though, with Firefox, OBS, Blender, Godot, and VS Code all being industry standard these days.

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u/Kinetic_Strike 1d ago

And in the non-open source world, Affinity was a paid competitor for around a decade, and is now free* after being acquired by Canva. And it still hasn't caught up, though it is very very good and probably does something like 95% of its Adobe counterparts. But for some people that 5% is important.

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u/dasbtaewntawneta 1d ago

and this is why i still use a cracked version of CS6 instead of GIMP

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u/xolotltolox 23h ago

Also, Patented features are still patented and illegal to reproduce

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u/NeilDiamondBlaze420 21h ago

The fact there isn’t an open source equilivant of photo editing like blender is insane to me.

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u/ChronoLink99 1d ago

That was before Fable. Hobbyist open source devs will eventually have more power with AI than professional software engineers did before AI. It may not be now, but within 2-3 years I don't see why not.

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u/needlesfox 1d ago

I think the main argument for why not is that coding a program that works and creating a product are two very different things, and AI is only good at the first one. Taking Photocraft from very impressive tech demo to tool that people can actually rely on would take a ton of human effort, even if it doesn't catch a legal ban hammer from Adobe.

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u/ChronoLink99 23h ago

Sure agree with all that. I'm only referring to the UI in my comment.