The State of GIMP & Its Future

[Delgarde]

I don't agree with some of your points, but this one is, I think, correct.
I was speaking with a ux friend and they said that it appeared that (it appears as if) "gnome is trying to look like apple without understanding why those exact choices were made." Importantly, apple designs makes decisions holistically, and, as a result, you can't just copy "random" elements without thoroughly understanding their context. That's a very hard job even for professional ux folks, let alone gnome "designers". It certainly doesn't help that gnome doesn't take (constructive) criticism well.

Funny you should say that, given that over the life of the project, Gnome has had far more investment in UX than pretty much any other open-source project. The people who designed Shell *are* UX folks - I can't say I like all their decisions, but those decisions aren't just the result of a bunch of developers arbitrarily copying Apple.

[wargames]

What they need to do is switch to QT, because the GTK+ guys are trying to destroy it. They are probably M$ employees.

[ua=42]

What they need to do is switch to QT, because the GTK+ guys are trying to destroy it. They are probably M$ employees.

Several projects have done that. Supposedly the jump from gtk2 to gtk3 is just as messy as porting from gtk to qt.

The benefit is that once you port to qt your application actually looks native on Windows, Mac, Kde, ....

(GTK guys aren't trying to destroy it.... they just believe/d (heck maybe they changed their minds) it should be gnome exclusive.)

[Guest]

Gimp team is the original creator of GTK.

I know, but it doesn't change anything. If I were an original creator of volkswagen does it mean I shouldn't switch to Ferrari?

[Guest]

There is only 1 modern, stable, and state-of-the art desktop environment available for linux: GNOME. So there is no reason to drop GTK despite the fact Qt's API and tools are a masterpiece of software development.

Good joke. KDE is much more stable, modern and better from my experience. GNOME suffers from memory leaks, very bad design decisions and it was slow last time I tried it with nvidia blob. I think GNOME should switch to Qt as well. However, they won't do that, because of stupid politics.

[rabcor]

No, that's not correct. Way back in the days, 1998, Matthias Ettrich gave a presentation at the Linux Kongress (https://krita.org/en/about/history/), where he showed off how easy it was to port GIMP to Qt. The GIMP developers weren't amused, and the patch was shelved. After a series of false moves (writing a GUI around ImageMagick, for instance), the kimageshop project was started, as part of KOffice. While the goal was to make it possible to load GIMP plugins, nothing from that codebase was used. Nothing much happened either, despite two renames and three core rewrites until 2004, when the project took off.

Pretty sure I checked and saw somewhere on Krita.org that it said it was a gimp fork :O you change anything boud? Or did I just misread? (I swear I googled this before I posted! )

Also... GTK = GIMP Toolkit and not GNOME Toolkit? Mind=blown

I did not know this... All of a sudden it's not surprising how much Qt has been ahead of GTK over past years haha.

[dkasak]

Several projects have done that. Supposedly the jump from gtk2 to gtk3 is just as messy as porting from gtk to qt.

Bullshit. I've ported a number of projects from gtk2 to gtk3 and it mainly involved a search + replace for constructors ( gtk2 to gtk3 ). The only major difference was in iterators and fetching the next iterator in a loop. It took me about 3 days worth of work for both ( large database ) projects.

The benefit is that once you port to qt your application actually looks native on Windows, Mac, Kde, ....

1) Windows widgets look different with each new version of Windows
2) Gtk is themable, as is QT.

(GTK guys aren't trying to destroy it.... they just believe/d (heck maybe they changed their minds) it should be gnome exclusive.)

Bullshit. I distribute Windows versions of my applications, and have had an OSX version appear on and off ( as requirements change ).

[Delgarde]

Bullshit. I've ported a number of projects from gtk2 to gtk3 and it mainly involved a search + replace for constructors ( gtk2 to gtk3 ). The only major difference was in iterators and fetching the next iterator in a loop. It took me about 3 days worth of work for both ( large database ) projects.

Although that did depend on how much deprecated gtk2 stuff you were using. For a well-maintained gtk2 app that kept in touch with the latest APIs, it was easy enough - indeed, quite a few Gnome apps could be compiled against either 2 or 3 during the transition. But a lot of apps didn't have the same kind of devotion to keeping up to date with changing APIs - because while gtk2 may have kept backward compatibility pretty well, they did introduce a lot of new APIs and deprecate a lot of old ones. And for those apps that still depended on stuff that got dropped in gtk3, porting is a whole lot more difficult.

[starshipeleven]

Funny you should say that, given that over the life of the project, Gnome has had far more investment in UX than pretty much any other open-source project. The people who designed Shell *are* UX folks - I can't say I like all their decisions, but those decisions aren't just the result of a bunch of developers arbitrarily copying Apple.

UX folks can copy apple without understanding the ins and outs of their design too.
Gnome has obvious usability issues all over the place, so I wouldn't say their UX guys are terribly good.

[prokoudine]

Pretty much all points in this thread have been covered by the projects's FAQ. So my takeaway from this thread is that the majority of present Phoronix readers don't read about stuff they discuss.

But hey, do carry on regardless, please.