[TooCreative]

And again no non-destructive adjustment layers, the saga continues!

When I talk to designers about Gimp they say "Uh, I tried it once years ago. But back then it was so archaic that you could not even change the contrast settings after you did something else to the image".

Little do they know. It is still that archaic.

12 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2091318

11 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890549

10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4814360

9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5912145

8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8969088

7 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9932717

6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12092173

5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15101108

4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17926027

3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20422647

2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25012155

1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29005637

Today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31419514

Don't get me wrong. I use Gimp daily and love it. I am very grateful to the people who build it. But how this feature can be ignored after people have been begging for it for over a decade now is beyond me. As far as I can see, it is the number one reason why people do not consider Gimp as a Photoshop replacement.

[michaelmrose]

> But how this feature can be ignored after people have been begging for it for over a decade now is beyond me.

Because begging for something which ordinarily is very expensive to be done for you for nothing is a meritless activity. An infinity of begging pays for not a single second of developer time.

It is likewise useless to suggest people would use it for free if only a few more million dollars worth of developer time was invested by other people. This isn't an offer of a favor. It's more like me saying that I would gladly come and stay in your guest room if you would only serve me coffee and donuts.

[whywhywhywhy]

If be interested to know what they thought was more important than adjustment layers to work on for a decade instead.

Just developer time alone invested doesn’t have inherent value if it doesn’t make the end product better.

[oblio]

> If be interested to know what they thought was more important than adjustment layers to work on for a decade instead.

Having fun developing whatever stuff they wanted, would be my guess.

And if they're getting paid for this, probably doing a good job convincing whoever's paying them that that stuff is important :-)

[whywhywhywhy]

So which is it? If it's a just for fun project why take feature requests and donations? I make a feature request I get told "well you're not paying for it...", yet they provide no way for me to pay for it. Why not have a bounty system to fund that work if that are your terms?

Just feels what this project is shifts into whatever it needs to be to ensure it doesn't ever get any better or progress in any meaningful way.

[michaelmrose]

Donations are driven presumably by people who are already sufficiently satisfied by current trajectory to want it to continue. Feature requests indicate that they desire to make it useful by understanding what things people want.

There is a difference between desiring to serve users needs and obligation to serve a particular need. No amount of need on your part constitutes an obligation on their part because simply you have paid them nothing and they offered you nothing other than the ability to use the current software as is or modify it. Nor indeed are they obliged to provide you a way to pay them for a particular feature although if you offered them a sufficiently large pile of money you might be able to reach a mutual understanding and certainly nothing prevents you from developing a fork or paying someone to do so right now.

A large problem with such an understanding forming is that the cost of such would be driven by the cost of expensive labor not your perception of the value to an individual end user. I have no idea what the actual cost of this is as I know nothing about their code but lets do a thought experiment.

Imagine if you will that making that happen in 2023 were to require 2 people who currently contribute to gimp part time to work on gimp full time for a year. This would in turn require replacing what they earn at their actual job including benefits. Suppose that for example required replacing $300,000 in wages. Unfortunately they may actually have long term employment that they like and not be enthused about working for one year and then going back on the job market. It might be much more feasible if it were possible to fund gimp development similarly for 5 years enabling not only your feature but others. This costs $1.5M dollars.

If someone responded to your feature request with sure thing will that be check charge or giant bag with a dollar sign I'm guessing you would laugh your ass off and move on.

[boudin]

It is on the roadmap for Gimp 3.2 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/milestones/14#tab-issu...

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/2468

[oblio]

Based on the milestone view, isn't Gimp 3.2 like 5 years into the future?

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/milestones

Gimp 3.0 is still at 23%.

[boudin]

Hard to say, it's a volunteer run project. It does mean that it's something that the current team want to do though.

[mikae1]

At work I'm on Creative Cloud with the latest M1 Max MBP. At I home I've switched to Manjaro after 17 years of macOS use.

I just started looking into Krita for bitmap editing. It has adjustment layers (which I can't do without). Switching from Lightroom to darktable was quite dramatic, but I actually prefer darktable now. Took me two years of on and off fiddling to finally get to that point.

[unixhero]

Krita is the real juggernaut.

[allendoerfer]

This is the single biggest problem with Gimp.

As long as it is missing, you have to duplicate layers and do some mental version control, which becomes really memory intensive after you have descended the tree a few steps. That's why you cannot really recommend Gimp to anyone, who wants to work professionally with it.

It is also a reason why Gimp cannot get better at Photoshop compatibility, so the issue even blocks the second biggest reason hindering further Gimp adoption.

[formerly_proven]

This might be a case of familiarity blindness; people working on GIMP might have come to implicitly assume that destructive editing is a feature, but in reality destructive editing is something only done for resource constraints, not because it's actually good. That's why non-destructive editors essentially never grow destructive features, while most destructive editors tend to grow and expand their non-destructive features.

If you want to argue this from first principles, it's actually very easy: One of the first principles of UX is to respect the user's work. Destructive editing is pretty bad at that. qed.

[Beldin]

Gimp is open source. Don't get me wrong, I love users and am very grateful for feedback. But how they can continue to make noise over a feature for over a decade without learning to code and implement it themselves or, you know, just hire developers to do it for them is beyond me. As far as I can see, this is not wanting a feature, but "wanting" a feature.

[jwagenet]

These are users who have a very competitive alternative and have no incentive to whip up the fix themselves. Usually the way it goes is an open source advocate asks why a user doesn’t use gimp, and the user has reasons xyz, then the advocate makes noise on the user’s behalf. It’s not like the real users are pining for these features, they just go somewhere else.

[matsemann]

Eh, those wanting the feature pay for Photoshop instead. Most are probably not freeloaders moaning, but people with problems they want to solve now.

[whywhywhywhy]

Why would anyone want to help making the GIMP project better if this has been the attitude of the project?

Not entirely convinced the archaic base is even worth building off at this point.

I’d be more inspired in building the thing that would destroy GIMP and Photoshop than help make GIMP better.

[geenat]

100% this.

No adjustment layers stops every designer cold.

Makes every other effort seem like "the road to get to adjustment layers".

[themodelplumber]

Why post this kind of thing on an announcement though...I mean it seems pretty harsh, if not rude.

If you can't get traction and it's really objectively that big of an issue, a separate post seems more appropriate.

I taught Photoshop at the college level prior to 2010, offered experienced PS students extra credit to try out and evaluate software like GIMP, and many of them thanked me for the experience and went on to use it in their professional life. Those who didn't want to take the PS route seemed more than happy to duplicate layers as backups and work destructively a lot of the time, too. We focused on pixel editing logic quite a bit so maybe that's why.

[TooCreative]

I agree that it feels a bit harsh. I feel a bit guilty.

But "silent mouths don't get fed". And I think I am speaking for a large number of users. And it's been over ten years now. So the voice of users might become a bit louder? I dunno. I read through all the features in the announcement and think "I don't need any of that. Who asked for all these things? Are they really user driven?".

[geocar]

You should feel guilty! You sounded extremely entitled there. How do you feel when someone asks you -- goads you really, into working for "exposure" instead of your usual rates? It's more than a little insulting!

If you want Free Software to be different, change it. If you don't know how now, like with anything else, you can learn how, or you can pay someone who has already spent the time to learn. The gimp project has a page where you can easily reach out to developers working on Gimp and fund them directly. If you think this feature is important, you should reach out and find out how you can help make it happen.

Now I don't work on gimp, but I do make Free Software, and I think most of us who program Free Software aren't working for "exposure". We aren't excited to be "used" by "users", and so of course we do not do anything "user driven". We do stuff because we want to, and when we don't want to, we may want-to for money. Like everybody else.

[totalkrill]

This is very true. It should really be more understood, that open source developer are basically sharing their hobby and what they create with others on their terms, not their users....

Imagine someone building furniture in their free time because they enjoy doing so, and then offers to give it away for free. You see this offer and now have two polite options:

1) decline, because you do not like it

2) accept because you do like it

I have never understood the people who take the third option:

3) complain that the furniture is not to their liking, and then demand that the person builds it to his/hers specification and then give it to them. Free of charge, because that was the original offer right?

[oblio]

The Open Source community does the opposite, that's the issue.

Every time there's a push for commercial apps on desktop Linux, you have a bunch of rabblerousers throwing dirt at said devs. "They should make it Open Source! Micro$oft paid them off"

You can see it in every Linux forum.

At some point Linux distributions should just admit defeat for this kind of software, recognize that the Gimp and co. are just hobbyist software, and accept the real world and endorse commercial software for these use cases.

Instead every time this kind of discussion happens, someone compares a kiddie toy truck (Gimp) to a 10 ton semi (Photoshop).

It's really a shame when true commercial quality Open Source software exists out there, such as Blender.

[geocar]

> It's really a shame when true commercial quality Open Source software exists out there, such as Blender.

That might be because the Blender users banded together and bought Blender[1] (with the help of one of the authors IIRC)

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20021010045558/http://www.blende...

> At some point Linux distributions should just admit defeat for this kind of software, recognize that the Gimp and co. are just hobbyist software, and accept the real world and endorse commercial software for these use cases.

Aren't they already doing that? I think commercial software has been targeting Linux almost since it came on the scene, simply because it made eval easier. Ubuntu distributes lots of nonfree stuff. If you count the enterprise (and perhaps depending on how you count that), I think it's possible more commercial software runs on Linux than on any other operating system.

But I can certainly agree there just isn't very much good commercial Linux desktop software. Do you think it's possible perhaps too many Linux desktop users consider price to be the biggest reason they use Linux (or assume, reading comments like that online that most users anyway) and so there just isn't any money to be had?

[themodelplumber]

If this is true you should really get those users to give you objective evidence that 1) they exist and 2) they feel this urgent about it then, at the very least

Edit: Probably not in the form of HN search results though? Lol come on, a bit of a quality issue there if we're going for objectivity.

GIMP devs have been hammered by highly subjective UX & feature critics for decades now. They are humans and know they'd be doing work on behalf of people who seem complainy, persistent, and lacking perspective compared to their own priority view. So, software Karens? :-) Where's the carrot? How is this issue supposed to turn out well for anyone involved?

If it's really objective and a big deal and not just subjective annoyance compounded by years of boundaries set in your path, show the proof and be convincing about it. And this may seem a stretch but I think it can be done gently if you will it.

[TooCreative]

    get those users to give you objective
    evidence that they exist

Here are a few hundred:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Here are a few hundred thousand:

https://www.google.com/search?q=gimp+%22non-destructive%22