I mean... Gimp works. And if your first job is CAD, Programming, or something non-artistic, Gimp is what I'm willing to pay for.

I'm willing to pay $4000+ for my profession's tools. But when it comes to a hobby, cheap or free is better.

Highly recommend Krita over Gimp. its a much better product and has much better tooling and color handling

As a random Linux schmuck user who occasionally does very light image editing and processing, the few times I've tried to use Krita I have absolutely no idea how to do anything (without looking up a guide), while I can usually do whatever in Gimp pretty easily. Granted, I've never tried for very long, but that was my first impression.

Maybe Gimp has just rotted my brain over the years with its UI...

Are you familiar with Photoshop etc workflows? Krita is pretty similar to those, whereas Gimp is the outlier in UI/UX.

So I can see going from Gimp to a more standard interface being difficult, if Gimp is what you're used to. Conversely so many people hate using Gimp because of the same reason if they're used to Photoshop

Oh, absolutely, hence why I joked that Gimp has poisoned my mind. I'm not sure which would necessarily be more intuitive for a total beginner, but I know I'm just used to Gimp.

On top of that, I downloaded Krita again, and the UI seems more approachable than I remember. Don't know what's up with that, maybe there was some freak misconfiguration last time I tried. Ah well.

Sounds like you opened Krita expecting it to behave just like Gimp. You should take an hour and actually learn Krita. As someone who learned photoshop in the 90s, InkScape, Painter, Gimp, etc. Krita is my GOTO for any art needs now.

I tried to load 30GB image to Krita, it crashes. Gimp handles it pretty well.

Hmmmm, how much ram did the PC have that his happened on?

Did you mean MB rather than GB?

Kind of wondering what kind of image would be 30GB... :)

Aperio SVS

Thanks. Found info on that file format:

* https://openslide.org/formats/aperio/

* https://web.archive.org/web/20120420105738/http://www.aperio...

Pages 14 onward give the info. Seems like it's a variation of TIFF, in tiled format.

Main tile (image) size is 120k x 80k. That's huge!

29GB when saved uncompressed. I'd hope most applications would use the optional compression features. :)

This was 360 degree mosaic, about 100kX100k

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

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) as a painting tool. Darktable (https://www.darktable.org) does photo editing, although I haven't used it myself.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

+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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

GIMP can use a lot of ram, you need those 8 ram slots to run it properly.

I also find this preposterous, but it's what the article measured. For me it would be a replacement for my HP z-series workstation I use mostly to build C++ software.