guanx, it has nothing to do with anyone's origin. Mark's is simply being charitable by suggesting that FeyFre's stated attitude is so far off-base that something must be being lost in translation. The other alternative is that he actually means what he's saying: in which case he is demonstrating an attitude of entitlement, ignorance and ungratefulness that is staggering to behold. And if that is really the case then I despair.


(edit: Mark, sorry, we cross-posted there - wasn't trying to step on your toes)

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Long time graphics person here. I have paid for photoshop, and have used it since 1994, though I haven't paid for a version in over 10 years.

About 2007, I started using a mix of photoshop and GIMP. Mainly because I'm a contractor, and sometimes I show up at a client's location, sometimes I never know what hats I'll be wearing on a given day. "Oh by the way, can you correct a few small issues on our website?" "Sure let me take a look."

Something graphical needs tweaking, hence I'll load GIMP on one of their systems.

About 3 years ago I switched to GIMP completely. I have multiple workstations, and I'm not paying for a photoshop license for each one. So now my ancient copy of photoshop stays on the shelf.

tip: One of the first things I do in GIMP after install is to add zoom-in/zoom-out to the mousewheel roll action. Out of the box, a press and hold of the mousewheel allows pan, so when combined with the added behavior of zoom-in/zoom-out with a roll of the mousewheel, it gives me very efficient navigation.

Anyway, that's my sales pitch for "da gimp!" To make this slackware related, I find the version on 64bit slackware very fast, and able to handle huge images. I've experienced some unexplained performance/slowness issues in a couple of versions of GIMP on ubuntu... for whatever that's worth.

d

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With the exception of some Google Summer of Code projects, none of the developers are paid to work on GIMP. The GIMP project itself pays none of its contributors -- translators, artists, interface designers, etc are all volunteers.

On rare occasion (once?), GIMP funds have been used to purchase specific hardware such as a graphics tablet for development purposes, but aside from this donations have traditionally been spent on server maintenance and (partial) travel expenses for attendance of graphics conferences such as Libre Graphics Meeting, which is taking place as we speak.

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Calm down, please, calm down.
I respect Open Source, I respect Free Software, I respect those who dedicates own time to work on such projects. But I don't understand, how GIMP can carry title of "Alternative to Photoshop" and do nothing to prove it? Even the easiest thing which must be done - provide pre-built binaries, so Windows users can start to use it now. Where? Nowhere. Developers - not only those who write C-code, but also those of arranges project flow. My original sentence was directed to them first place. If they do not care of their child - and so of its users, why I should kneel before them.
If somebody asks me for PS alternative, what I must answer? "There is GIMP, but you cannot use it because most recent feature-rich version did not built for Windows yet."
You can advise "Do It Yourself". Ok, I will tell it to those 14-16 year girls, who literally afraid words like: command line, script, compiler, build chaintool, repository.

Regards, FeyFre

I agree: there is something magical about 'AlienBob' that makes his real name, well, less memorable.

I personally think it's wonderful that the GIMP will be in single window mode now, but perhaps that is just because I'm a 'weekend' graphical tinkerer at the very best.

Not to hijack the original thread, but for those of you who use the GIMP, what is your opinion of the change (even though most of you probably haven't tested it yet)? Is there some reason you prefer one over the other?

Personally, when I'm using the GIMP, I usually have a mess of windows open and GIMP wanting to open at least 3 windows (if not many more, depending on how many images I have open) makes navigating through the windows a bit of a pain. Also, I sometimes close the layers panel by accident and can never seem to quickly remember how to open it again. I did say I am at best an amateur, non? I think this change will be a very welcome one, next time I've got some editing to do.

I look forward to trying this out, once some (brave) kind soul makes it available to us!

2 members found this post helpful.

The old version of gimp didn't work all that well with the tiling window manager I use. That's the primary reason I've been looking forward to this update.

Yep, same here.

You can try my SlackBuilds i posted on my SlackHacks

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@willysr

Thank you very much for your work.

cheers,

Open Source developers develop because it is fun for them. What kind of fun might be different and matter of personal preference. Some think it is fun to maintain something 4 versions behind (Debian Oldstable), package a distro for 14 architectures, they just stopped support for Eniac (Debian), take a perfectly good desktop environment and ruin that (KDE4).

Gimp developers seem to have fun in programming a bitmap editing program. Highly unusual, but they even decided to implement single window mode after 15 years, because of many users seemed to prefer that. But apparently packaging for Windows is not one of the things that make fun for them. Maybe it is too difficult to support Vista, XP and 7, maybe they don't want to pay for a MS Technet or MS Developer fee (if something like that exists), maybe they rather want to be found dead than found next to a Windows box. They might leave it to the community, or anyone, including commercial companies to package and release for Windows.

jlinkels

libffi should have never been installed with gcc-java, but we didn't know any better at the time. The gcj binary has libffi statically linked into it, so nothing on the system actually *needs* libffi.so shipped with gcc-java. That said, it's a great idea to perhaps try to make glib2 link libffi.so.4 that's already on the system, but it's going to fail with missing symbols even after you fix up all the other fail associated with it (note that glib2-2.30.x might build, but 2.32.x definitely did not). Even if I happened to miss something there, and perhaps 2.32.x *will* build by fixing up a pkgconfig file, it's still an ugly solution. The best way to handle it is to remove the libffi stuff that's being shipped with gcc-java (one of my Gentoo friends provided a nice sed line to do that) and then package the standalone libffi - that's almost surely how we're going to proceed with this.

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Thanks robby. As I said in the other thread I agree with your position on this. The hacked together .pc file did manage to build glib-2.33.1 successfully here though and I got my new gimp working that night.

I'll be doing a fresh current install soon though, mine is now far too 'tainted' to provide any meaningful feedback with regard to the development of current.

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Although I didn't use your slackbuilds per se I did use your build order and your configure options so thanks for that, gimp is now up and running in mdi mode ( when i found it the option is a bit buried! ), as I do some themeing I tend to have a number of gimp windows open at a time which was making finding a particular image annoying the mdi mode makes life MUCH easier.

... And wished I hadn't bothered.

The MDI is great but first thing I had to do was crop up and rescale a dozen jpegs OMG! The autocrop left artifacts behind the picture was imported as xcf so I couldn't just save the the result I had to re-export it as a jpeg (wtf!) then had to set the quality of the jpeg via the slider in the export dialog to 100% every time as it would not remember the setting ( yes I did click "save defaults" ) then I had yet another dialog box asking me if I wanted to save the image when I closed it, NO! I just BLOODY saved it you stupid piece of #£$%, then finally I had to close the window twice to make it go away!

Sorry about the rant and the overuse of exclamation marks but this is software that's only fit for windose.
I am about to junk version 2.8 and go back to the original version.

P.S. I think the old GIMP is a great piece of software and I use it often.

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Keith,

thanks for your reply. Even amid all the punctuation, your message shines through: some kinks still need to be worked out.

I'll probably keep my nose out of it until the team packages it up.

Any other opinions?