So, real talk, be completely honest with me - how usable is GIMP these days? I’m not trying to pick a fight, I think it’s great that GIMP exists, but while I may not be a professional artist, I am a developer with an interest in graphical design and I would say that I am an advanced user of the Adobe Creative Suite tools - the main three that I use being Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
I would be willing to learn to use GIMP to replace Photoshop, and Inkscape to replace Illustrator, for example, but only if they’re actually good enough to put to real, productive use.
I need my tools to get out of the way and let me work. If it crashes and loses my work EVER, then it is completely beyond consideration for me. If it’s good enough for light users but not really ready for professional use, then I don’t think I can really consider switching.
I do not use any of the 3D or AI features of any of those tools, if that helps.
I would really appreciate your opinions and advice. Please don’t be optimistic - I know it’s hard sometimes to be critical about open source software because of our ideological beliefs, but please try your best to be realistic.
Oh, and if you’re going to just tell me to try it, please try to contain that impulse. It would be a huge undertaking for me to relearn basically everything about how I work with these tools, so if I went through all that just to find that I couldn’t actually make use of them because they’re not ready yet, it would be a huge waste of time and energy, both of which I have in quite short supply these days.
Thank you so much for your time :)
Its very easy to use and my goto image editor, but I say that from a position of familiarity of having learned where everything is and what all the keybindings are over many years.
In contrast, Krita seems like a far better image editor, but because the interface is bewildering to me, I’ve shied away from it.
In my experience, Inkscape can be used as a professional replacement for Illustrator. It has never crashed on me. There may be some limitations, but nothing super inconvenient or something there isn’t a workaround for.
GIMP, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. I believe Krita is a much better candidate to be used professionally than GIMP. GIMP has an objectively bad UI, has weird quirks for very simple tasks, and is prone to crashes. I use GIMP for simple image editing and Krita for more complex projects. GIMP 3.0 is their best chance to fix their reputation and I’m hopeful it will deliver.
If you don’t have time to try them yourself, follow creators who use them and check their workflow. I recommend Davies Media Design on YouTube for great videos on Inkscape especially.
Edit: No program is completely immune to crashes, it’s good practice to routinely save projects no matter how stable or unstable the program is.
Honestly it’s better but still a mess of design choices. For open source graphics editor check out Krita.
Forget Harris & Trump. Here comes GIMP!
LETS GOOO
At least something good happened today
lol … this will be one for the memory books
American loses their minds … for the 100th time … on the same day as GIMP 3.0 was released
MIGA
Make Image-manipulation Great Again
It’s not released yet.
Well yes it needs to be inaugurated first, which will not happen until January.
Not necessarily. An insurrection might overthrow the maintainers before they can push the release
lol … classic GIMP … this is becoming the best part of a terrible day
GIMP 3.0 has kinda sorta maybe been released but they’re still working on it
RC1 = Release Candidate no. 1
Almost got me cheered up for a second there, GIMP. Nice try.
wholesome gimp trying to cheer us up
Can’t wait, it’s becoming really usable (I always needed adjustment layers, and it now mostly has them). I wish they offered an appimage though, I’m not big on flatpaks due to size.
In the release blog they mentioned working on appimage. Right now they are only using it for testing purposes and it should be compatbible with Debian. But there is no “official” distribution as of now.
Appimage doesn’t do deduplication where possible like Flatpak does, where did you get the idea that Flatpak packages are bigger?
I was also wondering about this. Flatpaks apparently come with more libraries to interact with other Flatpaks, whereas AppImages tend be purely app-specific and their libraries are compressed for their usage only.
It’s about time, after like 20 years.
There’s third party Appimages. They also had a blog post discussing using Appimages for testing builds. If that gets done, I don’t see why they wouldn’t offer an official build.
Is this real?
No, it’s only code and pixels 🙂
Most of all it’s photoshopped!
We say peppered round deez parts
So close…! 😂
Exciting! Hoping the RC process is short for this version 🤞🤞🤞
Having an RC is a good sign, we can let them have as many RCs as they need now.
Yeah, fingers crossed for an actual release before New Year, though.
New year 2026? 😉
Just any year, I’m not unreasonable 😂
I’m just really excited by this major version, and am impatient to get my hands on the final release…
