I appreciate your insights in the matter, and with 3.0 here I may have to give GIMP another try!

I heard 3.0 came out today but I haven’t quite gotten around to trying it out. (I just got home recently, so…) I think I’ll go do that now! :)

Edit:

Sigh… Yeah it definitely still needs improvements.

I copy/paste an image onto a blank window, then press Shift-Ctrl-X to crop to selection; it doesn’t work.

So I look it up and find that the Crop to Selection option is located under the Image tab. Okay, so I click Image and go to click Crop to Selection. It’s greyed out.

I go to find out why, and according to the Documentation, it is greyed out if “there is no selection for the image”.

The Crop to Selection command crops only the active layer to the boundary of the selection by removing any strips at the edge whose contents are all completely unselected. Areas which are partially selected (for example, by feathering) are not cropped. If there is no selection for the image, the menu entry is insensitive and grayed out.

Why it doesn’t automatically treat copy/pasted layers as selections is beyond me. Most other paint software (even MS Paint!) does this. It’s basic design nowadays.

Just why? Why does GIMP have to hurt me like this? T_T

Edit 2:

And it needs to have Lanczos interpolation available for resizing. At present, it only has Linear, Cubic, NoHalo, and LoHalo, whatever the hell those last two are as I’ve never heard of them before.

Yeah, I’m still salty that Google and most other search engines have cut out some of the boolean operators over the last decade or so.

.........Touché.

Oh that.

Yeaaaah that gets kind of annoying I imagine…

I feel ya there, friend. Haha.

I think this example just confused me honestly. Sorry.

Put another way, though, is it basically like a sock being pushed so far inward that it goes inside-out and gets bigger again?

Okay, so it’s likely to happen. I never disputed that. But just because the VP says he intends for it to happen still is not the same as a statement by the company that it will happen. He could get vetoed. He could lose his job. There could be a material shortage. Trademark disputes. A kraken could fly through his window and devour his testicles forcing him to be in the hospital on the exact day the paperwork has to be filed.

The fact remains this article is titled in a very clickbaity way because it jumps to the foregone conclusion that “want to do” = “will 100% happen”.

I agree. Monopolies/oligopolies are terrible for the consumer.

I feel the same except Google is worse due to higher number of ads in results

I generally don’t see ads due to uBlock Origin. Or am I just not noticing them? Lol.

and most SEO prioritizes Google over Bing meaning more Google results are AI spam articles.

I will give you that. But I find that’s the case with DDG too which is why I’m having to rely more and more on search operators like site:. I agree that it’s really annoying.

GIMP 3.0 brings non-destructive editing.

Ah, that is good news! I actually heard about that but kinda forgot, so thanks for reminding me.

It looks like the UI is going to be pretty similar for the time being

Balls.

but the developers have set up dedicated groups to work on it.

Well there’s that at least. It seriously needs a tune-up in that department.

I’m probably one of the rare people who is used to it/likes it as it is and doesn’t really want to re-learn it if it changes but anything that helps new people get involved and feel positive using and improving GIMP is welcome in my book.

I appreciate your candor and your position. I know it must have been many hours of struggle to figure everything out to the degree you have. But as you said, this would help new blood get in the door. After all, sure, overcoming a program’s overly obtuse UI & UX is definitely a thing to be proud of, but frankly it shouldn’t be that obtuse in the first place. Very few people have, or even should be expected to have, the patience to struggle for a half-hour (or more!) to figure out things that in most other programs can be done in seconds. (This isn’t an exaggeration; I’ve had to do this, and only because other programs on Linux were no better.)

On the surface it might look like all that has happened in 3.0 is the introduction of Layer Effects but my understanding is that the whole thing has been re-written to make it easier and faster to make future progress with it. Hopefully this will be a reboot for GIMP!

This is good to know! I’m frustrated with GIMP but I still love the ideas it represents, and am hoping it improves to be able to meet the expectations users want to have of it!

to rotate a layer press Shift+R

You are a goddamned saint.

Oh that’s good! Thanks for laying that out for me. And, please, don’t take what I say as bashing the one guy who’s working on this (at least I hear it’s only one person). I think for a single person it’s incredible what they’ve gotten to, and I salute them for that. I was merely explaining it from an objective viewpoint. I have very little but respect for the guy behind it all.

Exactly.

And even with the stuff it can do takes 10x longer to do than with most other raster editing software because the UI and UX is so darn convoluted. Like, seriously, I want to like GIMP, but frankly I and most people in fact ain’t gonna spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to rotate a layer. Lol.

Frankly, at this point, I just wish Paint.\NET was able to be run on Linux, but I believe it still uses some Windows-specific components—can’t remember what they are—that can’t quite yet be replicated properly using Mono. (Might be some Windows-specific DLLs? Idk.)

Oh I did not realize that! Excellent. :)

Didn’t know that Codeberg did that. I’ll have to add that to my list of reasons why I love Codeberg. Lol.

Yeah I know, and I don’t like that limitation. Lol. xD

To be honest with you, I didn’t even know that was a feature. (Unless I’m misunderstanding you.) Sounds cool!

If I need to search a website, I use either Ctrl+F or the site: search engine operator.

Ohhh you know that makes sense. So, basically, what you’re saying is this?

[Files] = [Files]

[Compressed Archive] = [Files] + [Archive Metadata]

Daughters of Darkness, by Halestorm.

Fuck yeah… Yo_oY

This is good news. There are a lot of great FOSS alternatives on Linux, but raster editing is one of the last few blind spots, I’ve found.

• Krita is designed more for painting,
• MyPaint also seems designed more for digital artwork (and, perhaps just in my experience, but it also seemed rather unstable and kept crashing)
• KolourPaint is very barebones (seems to be much more a replacement to MS Paint than anything else, so can’t really blame it for that)
• Inkscape is a vector editor. 'Nuff said.
• Pinta is the closest to Paint.\NET you’re gonna get on Linux, except it’s based on before the latter went closed-source (bastard…) and as such it’s not as feature-complete as Paint.\NET is.

GIMP, meanwhile, doesn’t even have nondestructive editing and also can’t draw basic shapes (like squares, cylinders, etc.), can’t seemingly rotate layers without opening the [floating RMB menu] > Layer > Transform > Arbitrary Rotation dialog window, and good GOD the floating menus can go fuck themselves. How I hate the floating menus. Did I mention the floating menus suck? Not sure if I mentioned that.

Anyway, this switch to 3.0 is really needed and I’m genuinely excited to see the changes it brings, to the UI and the UX in particular.

Just a shame that they’re switching over to GTK3 when most other developers seem to be transitioning to GTK4.

Why does it get bigger? I’ve wondered that for a while now.

I would think that compressing something that’s already compressed would still compress it further but at diminishing returns.