Gimp and Libreoffice both seem to go out of their way to do everything their own way and ignore what has been demonstrated to work well and has essentially been established as a standard, this is one of the major issues with OSS for me along with trying to offer more than is reasonable and put in time on niche features (MORE MORE MORE) instead of working out the issues with what is already implemented. LibreCAD is a prime example example of doing it their own way, cutting off their nose in spite of their face, there was no reason to change most every command and require us to hit return after every single command. The free version of QCAD is still superior to LibreCAD and it is difficult to justify suffering through all of LibreCAD's failings when QCAD only costs $45 with a year of updates, even if you don't renew that outdated QCAD it is still more capable and usable than LibreCAD.
I have used nothing but linux for over two decades now but it is getting harder and harder to justify using linux, too much of the software is so fixated on competing that they have lost all perspective. For awhile now I have seriously considered switching to Haiku and developing the software I want for Haiku with its API that will not run on anything else, but I have not quite been irritated enough to go that far. Getting there and it might happen once Haiku irons out those last few wrinkles.
Edit: Should add, been a few years since I last used LibreOffice, they may have gotten their act together. I suffer gimp far too often.
> Gimp and Libreoffice both seem to go out of their way to do everything their own way and ignore what has been demonstrated to work well and has essentially been established as a standard, this is one of the major issues with OSS for me along with trying to offer more than is reasonable and put in time on niche features (MORE MORE MORE) instead of working out the issues with what is already implemented.
I haven't tried GIMP or LibreOffice for years now, but I speculate this is one outcome of ego-driven development instead of market-driven development, and possibly also because UX people aren't contributing as much to open source as developers are.
> I have used nothing but linux for over two decades now but it is getting harder and harder to justify using linux
At least in the context of windows vs Linux, Microsoft is making it incredibly easy. Once again pushing MS recall, integrated ads, and user hostile updates made me finally switch to Linux again. I absolutely hated having a computer that seemed to have a mind of its own. I had a dual boot setup that defaulted to Linux, and very frequently I would be doing something in Windows, leave the computer on with programs or games running, and come back to find that it had rebooted into Linux.
People keep recommending Krita or photopea against Gimp but I am using both (Krita for digital painting, gimp for other stuff) and have made back to back test with all 3 software and the UI is almost identica[1] so that is just ignorance talking.
[1] just a handful of menus in a different order woaaaaa torture indeed!!!
I have only ever used GIMP and I will admit that the UI looks like hell. I also rarely do anything very advanced in it anymore so I can’t say whether it has feature parity with PS.
You're free to recommend it, but if you tell somebody coming from a Mac that GIMP is an alterantive to tools like like Affinity Photo, Pixelmator, Acorn, or even Photoshop, you're doing them a disservice, because it's not.
I'm glad that GIMP works for you. That's good. And technically, it probably does a lot (or even everthing) that most people do in other applications. And maybe you can even argue that it doesn't do those things worse, it just does them differently.
But the reality is that if you're used to a tool like Acorn on the Mac, which puts a huge priority on providing a good, efficient user experience, you're just never going to switch to GIMP.
Same applies to a tool like OmniGraffle. I've looked everywhere, there's nothing like OmniGraffle on Linux. By that, I don't mean that there aren't any tools that allow you to create diagrams and mockups, I mean there aren't any tools that are as nice, simple, and quick to use as OmniGraffle.
I didn't recommend it, I offered three options (one specifically created to fix the exact issue you're probably complaining about - GIMP's horrendous UI)
The problem is, you imply the alternative solutions are somehow just a stand-in replacement, which is not true, and not just with Gimp in the programs you listed. Software matters, and when software you need is not available, it is a significant compromise.
Ousted the front door, coming back by the backdoor:
- “Maybe you’re using it wrong”
- “It has greatly improved since Gimp 2.0”,
- “It’s just doing things differently”
- “It has 90% of the features of MS Office”
seem to be the top arguments for trying Linux over Mac, again for the 20th time in 20 years, each time awfully bad. As Steve Jobs once said about Microsoft: “The problem is these people have no taste.” It’s correct that when you have no need for something to be beautiful or no need to be productive between two recompilations of the kernel, then Linux is the OS of choice.
My backups work though. As a Linux user, it's exhausting watching people complain about macOS and Windows every single day on this site, because there's nothing you can do about. You're a captive prisoner on their platform.
For some of us, dealing with GIMP's warts is more tolerable than the alternatives.
I'm fairly certain that anyone who recommends GIMP hasn't really used GIMP.