GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
If you've been following GIMP's progress over recent years, you couldn't help yourself noticing the decreasing activity in terms of both commits (a rather lousy metric) and amount of participants (a more sensible one). 'GIMP is dying', say some. 'GIMP developers are slacking', say others. 'You've got to go for crowdfunding' is yet another popular notion. And no matter what, there's always a few whitebearded folks who would blame the team for not going with changes from the FilmGIMP branch. So what's actually going on and what's the outlook for the project?"
Posted Nov 23, 2015 15:59 UTC (Mon)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (4 responses)
2.8 happened over five years ago; the program's very own toolkit has been declared obsolete in that time. That's just embarrassing.
Posted Nov 23, 2015 23:34 UTC (Mon)
by prokoudine (guest, #41788)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Nov 24, 2015 18:58 UTC (Tue)
by xtifr (guest, #143)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 25, 2015 0:57 UTC (Wed)
by prokoudine (guest, #41788)
[Link]
Posted Nov 25, 2015 3:52 UTC (Wed)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Posted Nov 23, 2015 17:11 UTC (Mon)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link]
Posted Nov 23, 2015 21:16 UTC (Mon)
by xtifr (guest, #143)
[Link] (43 responses)
Though I was really hoping they'd finish adapting to gegl sooner rather than later. 2.8 began using it internally, and 2.10 was supposed to finish adapting the UI to take full advantage of it. Not really sure where that whole effort stands.
But really, I think it's reasonable to switch more of the focus to add-ons and the like, and not have the core changing so much. That should be part of the point of an open, plug-in oriented system.
Posted Nov 23, 2015 23:36 UTC (Mon)
by prokoudine (guest, #41788)
[Link]
Posted Nov 24, 2015 20:52 UTC (Tue)
by jensend (guest, #1385)
[Link] (41 responses)
GIMP's development pace from its beginnings through 0.99 was tremendously rapid. Many people seriously expected that it would basically match Photoshop by 2000.
Then its initial authors Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis moved on to other things, as did several others who made huge early contributions. In the intervening 18 years, though there have been a number of people who've done good things, most of the things users would have said were the most important things to change back in 1998 still haven't come to pass today.
My old O'Reilly GIMP handbook from before the dotcom crash still covers most all of GIMP (a notable exception: G'MIC, which is an external project), and the limitations it notes are still the limitations GIMP has today.
Some major architectural changes were going to be necessary, and people came up with a very ambitious idea for that new architecture. That's GEGL, and though the article is hopeful about how the GEGL transition is going it fails to mention that GEGL has been in the works since 2000.
In the meantime, GTK's history went like this:
GIMP may have a GTK 3 port sometime in 2017, six years after GTK 3 was released.
All in all this is not the shining success story of the tool that is so perfect it doesn't need to be updated.
Posted Nov 25, 2015 10:17 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted Nov 25, 2015 21:19 UTC (Wed)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (10 responses)
It looks like Transmission already chose their future: Qt5. Just like Audacious, LXDE, Wireshark...
Posted Nov 25, 2015 23:02 UTC (Wed)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 26, 2015 3:00 UTC (Thu)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Posted Nov 26, 2015 16:49 UTC (Thu)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Nov 27, 2015 23:11 UTC (Fri)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (6 responses)
I don't know if the Qt toolkit or the apps using it are to blame, but every single keyboard/mouse shortcut customizing feature I've used in them has been useless whether it's Qt4, KDE4 or Qt5.
Posted Dec 6, 2015 11:23 UTC (Sun)
by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Dec 7, 2015 12:12 UTC (Mon)
by prokoudine (guest, #41788)
[Link]
Posted Dec 7, 2015 14:36 UTC (Mon)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (2 responses)
While there usually isn't a discrete "Configure Shortcuts..." dialog like in KDE apps, most Gtk+ apps will respond to highlighting a menu item and pressing the shortcut key that you want to assign to it.
Posted Dec 7, 2015 15:49 UTC (Mon)
by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Dec 7, 2015 19:50 UTC (Mon)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link]
According to <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GTK%2B#Keyboard_shor...> it should still work for Gtk+ 3, but you need to add the following option to your $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gtk-3.0/settings.ini file under [Settings]:
gtk-can-change-accels = 1
It's possible that the same is required in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 for Gtk+ 2; I don't remember whether I changed that option or not.
Posted Dec 8, 2015 21:09 UTC (Tue)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Posted Nov 30, 2015 18:22 UTC (Mon)
by wazoox (subscriber, #69624)
[Link]
Posted Nov 25, 2015 10:39 UTC (Wed)
by malor (guest, #2973)
[Link] (27 responses)
They care more about their brand than about the people using their software.
Posted Nov 25, 2015 13:56 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (26 responses)
Worth noting: KDE4 came out well before GNOME3, and got huge amounts of flak, yet GNOME3 repeated all the same mistakes and then some, while KDE embarked on an extensive course-correction.
My speculation: W J McCann most certainly knows what XFCE is. The goal in armtwisting Transmission to remove notification support is not about improving GNOME. It's about hurting everyone else. That's what GNOME has come to.
Posted Nov 25, 2015 19:36 UTC (Wed)
by prokoudine (guest, #41788)
[Link] (14 responses)
Posted Nov 26, 2015 0:20 UTC (Thu)
by malor (guest, #2973)
[Link] (2 responses)
Doesn't look like GNOME gets any of the credit.
Posted Nov 26, 2015 3:47 UTC (Thu)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (1 responses)
Only to the extend, there is a GTK3 frontend. Transmission independently deserves credit for being a solid torrent client and much of that is not desktop environment specific.
Posted Nov 26, 2015 4:24 UTC (Thu)
by malor (guest, #2973)
[Link]
Posted Nov 26, 2015 5:48 UTC (Thu)
by jensend (guest, #1385)
[Link] (10 responses)
Many, possibly all, of the technical problems mentioned in the rant have long since been addressed in one way or another. But the concerns about the attitude taken by GNOME and GTK developers are still relevant today. The concerns about the suitability of GTK as a solid foundation for serious programs outside of the core GNOME suite are still relevant today. The concerns about whether or not GTK has a long term future worth sticking around for are still relevant today. Plenty of folks have looked at those issues in the past several years and decided to switch to another toolkit.
Posted Nov 26, 2015 9:12 UTC (Thu)
by error27 (subscriber, #8346)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Nov 26, 2015 22:00 UTC (Thu)
by prokoudine (guest, #41788)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 26, 2015 23:56 UTC (Thu)
by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
[Link]
Posted Nov 27, 2015 9:27 UTC (Fri)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (6 responses)
GTK3 appears to be actively hostile to anything !GNOME.
Posted Nov 27, 2015 13:37 UTC (Fri)
by malor (guest, #2973)
[Link] (3 responses)
I'm thinking now that their goal shifted to serving themselves and their project. It looks to me like they decided that They Had A Vision, which happened to look a lot like Apple's iPad, and that Their Vision was much more important. Imaginary users became the goal of the project, not the real ones they actually had.
So, a number of years later, it really looks to me like desktop Linux has been terribly damaged. They burned the users they had trying to entice different ones, failed to do so because Their Vision was just recycled crap which didn't work that well on devices with normal screens and mice, and ended up with a much smaller community, and a huge loss of interest in using Linux. The kernel became popular on phones, but that's because of Android, with a totally different and incompatible userspace.
It seems to me that if you've got a user base, telling them to piss off while you go do something else is probably not going to work very well for most organizations.
Instead of focusing on making something absolutely amazing for people who really understood computers, they actively damaged it for that crowd to try to appeal to the non-technical.... and completely failed to do so.
Instead of figuring out how to expose power to the non-technical, which to my mind is the central goal of all UI design, they took the power away because it's so terribly confusing.
For me, personally, it's been all downhill on desktop Linux after Ubuntu 10.04. That version was *awesome*. It was friendly, it was usable, it was centered on mice and keyboards and large screens, and it was there to specifically make my life better. I was perfectly happy using it full time. But then GNOME 3 and then Unity came along, and they're just dismal.
Fortunately, Xubuntu is decent. I don't use Linux full time anymore, but with the advent of Windows 10, it looks like I will be again, and that's a reasonable alternative.
Posted Nov 27, 2015 13:41 UTC (Fri)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (1 responses)
Works for me. (I must donate to them sometime soon).
Posted Nov 27, 2015 16:47 UTC (Fri)
by malor (guest, #2973)
[Link]
XFCE handles that much better. It's still not perfect; the control panel in particular gets a little wonky with big fonts. But most stuff seems to work pretty well. And resizing the start menu, so that the larger names fit properly, is just a click and drag, which is really nice. I suppose it'd be even nicer if it sized itself, but a one-time drag isn't exactly an onerous burden.
If I could just figure out how to get the NVidia driver to stop flickering during scrolling, I'd be pretty happy with it.
Posted Nov 27, 2015 13:46 UTC (Fri)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link]
Posted Nov 27, 2015 14:58 UTC (Fri)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 27, 2015 15:12 UTC (Fri)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link]
Googling for i3 GTK3 csd suggests i3 had some issues with GTK3's move to CSD too. E.g.:
https://github.com/shimmerproject/Numix/issues/206
Posted Nov 27, 2015 12:35 UTC (Fri)
by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
[Link]
Posted Nov 27, 2015 12:53 UTC (Fri)
by jku (subscriber, #42379)
[Link] (9 responses)
After a sentence like this maybe it's time to step back and try to get a different perspective -- to consider the possibility that instead of being evil, the "others" might just be trying to accomplish a goal of their own that has _nothing_ to do with you. Accusing other people of malice just because they don't set their goals based on your needs and wants is part of why the open source culture is sometimes seen as hostile.
Posted Nov 27, 2015 14:53 UTC (Fri)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Nov 27, 2015 15:18 UTC (Fri)
by jku (subscriber, #42379)
[Link] (6 responses)
* "This should probably..."
This is not demanding by any definition of the word, but perfectly normal discussion on a feature request bug. McCann presented his opinion and explained the choices GNOME is making in this context. Note how he also did not throw any kind of tantrum or keep posting his opinion over and over when the developers apparently disagreed with him.
Posted Nov 27, 2015 15:29 UTC (Fri)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (2 responses)
That doesn't sound like a demand to you?
Posted Nov 27, 2015 15:48 UTC (Fri)
by jku (subscriber, #42379)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 28, 2015 7:06 UTC (Sat)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link]
It's nice to see GNOME is slowly recovering.
Posted Nov 27, 2015 18:13 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
"It is my hope that you go die and decompose"
Hmm, I like it. Very polite!
Posted Nov 28, 2015 7:34 UTC (Sat)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Dec 6, 2015 11:30 UTC (Sun)
by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
[Link]
Posted Nov 27, 2015 15:23 UTC (Fri)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link]
Here's the full quote: "The goal in armtwisting Transmission to remove notification support is not about improving GNOME. It's about hurting everyone else." rsidd is talking about "armtwisting Transmission", not "the goal of the GNOME project as a whole" as you imply.
The lament was that Gnome removed an ostensibly useful feature and declared that all other programs must do the same. Sure, "hurting others" is an overly dramatic way of wording this but it doesn't seem out of bounds to me.
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
1996-97: a one-off "hey my program needs some new toolkit code since I'm tired of Motif"
98-2002: a promising star of the open-source development world in an age when C++ compilers and runtimes had compatibility issues and QT was not as free as people needed
2002-2009: little progress
2010-present: an insular dead-end GNOME political agenda, hostile to other projects trying to make use of it and seen by many as a sinking ship from which the rats are fleeing
(cf https://igurublog.wordpress.com/tag/gtk3/)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
The article doesn't spare Ubuntu/Unity and KDE either, but the level of malice in the GNOME interactions doesn't compare.
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
Well, if I run a GTK3 app under a non-GNOME manager it's screwed up.
I'm curious about this. I use i3 (well, pure i3 on my work desktop, xfce with i3 as wm on my laptop) and a bunch of gnome apps, presumably gtk3 by now, on Ubuntu 15.04 (desktop) / 15.10 (laptop). I have not noticed any issues that you mention. On my laptop there are the weird and annoying Ubuntu floating/disappearing scrollbars, but I think Gnome is blameless there...
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
The goal ... is not about improving GNOME. It's about hurting everyone else. That's what GNOME has come to.
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
* "I guess you have to..."
* "It is my hope that..."
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
Actually the polite comment was: "It is my hope that you are a GNOME app", or, more fully,
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork... It is my hope that you are a GNOME app.
to which Charles of Transmission responded
*speechless*
Presumably Charles was rendered speechless by the extraordinary politeness of McCann! So unusual these days.
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)
GIMP is 20 Years Old, What’s Next? (Libre Graphics World)