Does it mean that to use a tool you must be capable of building it?

Does it mean that to share criticism you must be able to build it? I’m thinking about applying this logic to the rest of life and it’s rather amusing to imagine the silence. Hmm, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

I think one could more fairly say, “offer up money for someone to build the features you need” but I think that’s also a very difficult proposition given the logistics of the matter.

The tool is free, so you are free to use it, and you are free not to. That is up to you. If you want a feature, please support the development woth either you cash or skill. Its that simple.

No, it means it's not a priority for those who are building it.

No. I've reported a lot of tickets/feature requests for a lot of projects that seemed to be taken good.

But criticism that seems entitled is rarely appreciated, and surprise about some obviously, severely underfunded project missing features is not very impressive neither.

There is a shitload of other missing features OP could have mentioned on this anniversary post and I guess it can feel a bit depressing too. "27 years! Happy birthday! Still no job though?". Eeh.

You can express constructive criticism with some humility.

"It's a shame nobody has been able to work on adjustment layers and layer styles, which are important features in such a piece of software."

OP did not feel entitled to me, but I can understand who their message could have been taken somewhat badly.

What specifically in the comment suggests a sense of entitlement? For me, I see none. I see a, “as an expert user, it’s surprising that such an important feature has been missing forever and I would like to criticize that.”

Edit: I’m not allowed to reply to your response but thank you for taking the time to respond.

I don't work on the Gimp, I've read developers working on it at length, I think as a developer reading this comment I would be thinking "Well, we do what we can". Jehan, who wrote the post, contributes to the Gimp thanks to donations to his Ze Marmot project, his team cannot pay itself very well. They are going out of their way improving the Gimp anyway, indeed prioritizing features they need the most most certainly. But you can do only so much.

It might just be a matter of form/formulation. But it matters, because people won't take the time analyzing a comment for several minutes to completely put themselves in the commenter's shoes.

edit: you can respond by clicking on the "X minutes ago" link I think, but I saw your edit :-)

Subscription. Check. Paid add ons. Check. Paid color palette. Check and mark.

What's ironic is that I bought Affinity but still continue to use GIMP shrugs

One of these days I'll sit down with Affinity. One of these days...

Naw, there's better answers than that:

FOSS: Gimp, Krita; non foss: Affinity photo is a one-time purchase, at least for me. I haven't checked recently to see if that's changed.

>anyone using it professionally

Use what your boss tells you too/pays for -then it's not your problem.

Why would anyone with the talent required to do that invest time in a project that hasn’t been able to add these basic features.

Cloning the current GIMP feature set into a modern and competent system is easier than trying to work with the team that can’t ship these features alone.

There are very few active maintainers, what few there are have been scratching their own itches.

There is one capable of doing the three now: "Unified Transform Tool" (Shift+T)

The grouping is welcome for me, but the grey icons are less easy to read indeed.

But it's just a bummer, not a source of anger/furor/vitriol for the project. I don't get why so many folks are talking shit like they didn't get their refund.

The new text widget has improved recently, and it's certainly an improvement on the original.

It's still a great piece of software, and I'm very grateful that it exists, but when I use it, it's generally a version from the 2.4 series, because it suits my workflow better. (When there's no image open the older versions just have a small unobtrusive toolbox window open, which you can use as a drop target for files picked from a file browser; the newer versions have a large empty window which gets in the way.)

[For those who say "fork it yourself", I have contributed to development in the distant past - dithered gradients were my addition, and I wrote a plugin (subsequently adopted by someone in Japan but long-since abandoned) for separating RGB images to CMYK layers, and saving them as a CMYK TIFF. But despite briefly maintaining a PPA with a patched version without the "no image open" window I quickly decided life was too short to spend my hobby time trying to hold back that particular tide.]

Have you contributed to it any any way?

It’s almost unusable in OSX because of that.

I'd prefer to keep my ugly-but-capable GIMP on every platform rather than having a single half-decent MacOS version that bends over backwards to foreign HID.

I'm fully aware that (a) I'm a dinosaur, and (b) not the target audience of the GTK project in its current form, but I still miss things like the tear-off menus, and the tab-completion and wildcard filtering in the file dialog (without the current keyboard focus complications) from GTK1.2!

Does it really make sense for them to break so many things? Doesn't show a lot of respect for people who adopt the library.

GEGL aka duke nukem forever

If another project had become the de-facto we’d have all those basic features.

Instead we’re stuck with something that almost provides the basics ok, because it exists people treat it like a solved problem, and it has such a history no one’s allowed to say it just frankly isn’t usable for it’s one job.

My sister has used Photopea. She's as far from a sophisticated computer user as you can get. Regular people can stumble across Photopea, they certainly don't know about GIMP.

If anything, GIMP has brought more people to Linux from the dark side.

It’s actually even bad for students because to create with GIMP you have to do early 90s image editing workflows which are no longer used in real jobs.

It is not like it is extremely well funded or otherwise resource consuming.

> because it exists people treat it like a solved problem

People complaining about lack of alternative projects in open source is a new one for me

> it has such a history no one’s allowed to say it just frankly isn’t usable for it’s one job.

that is not how free software creation works like, really

The linux distribution model seems to lead it to, somehow. If you open up a RedHat machine and ask it for a picture editor, you're going to get Gimp, even though Krita would almost certainly be better at doing what you want.

(or tried filing any such configuration request in any Linux distribution and got it rejected/ignored?)

No idea what the timing of that version is.

Gnome integration and Wayland as far as I can tell from its roadmap. So basically staying functional under the ADHD driven development model that is the Linux desktop environment. A bit hilarious that Gimp now has a hard time staying up to date with Gnomes Gtk when Gtk was originally an UI lib for Gimp.

Yet not terribly surprising. GIMP provided a useful alternative widget framework because it helped them push boundaries. Now that's grown into its own thing, and the parent project lags since its core focus is elsewhere.

90% of the complaining that always happens in these threads is Photoshop/Irfanview/whatever users, coming in and assuming that the purpose of GIMP is to reimplement your favorite image editing software for free. That is not the goal, and it never has been. As long as you keep pretending anyone intends GIMP to be a Photoshop clone, you'll keep being disappointed.

After _three decades_ I can no longer blame anyone but the complainant.

They could have been implemented by overloading the layer blending code, and recoded with GEGL once ready. But pure won over "we can do that too now, please do not look behind the curtain". It's really simple: adjustment is just a layer that only uses mask data and operates on the bottom layer pixels with already coded functions (levels, contrast, etc). Styles would be similar, applying plugins/scripts. If when proposed the reply is "we will not accept that kind of crude system", nobody wastes time coding a patch.

That was not the only time GIMP project went the pure road. There was also drama with themes and paintbrush system. On the end, some of the old ideas managed to get there, like grey icon theme (now hated by some, the irony) or having a working paint system (I have not tested with a tablet, so no idea if any good). Even non coders were trying to help, for example contributing brushes and testing the system [0], yet they ran out of steam after some time of hitting walls. The few people involved now seem to be the ones that have been taking over after all the previous got seriously burnt (except Kolås). [0] https://www.ramonmiranda.com/gimp-paint-studio-su-pasado-pre... (autotranslation work OKish)

In a sense, Krita is not just better for painting. It's a better general purpose image editing program, specially in terms of UX