On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 6:16 AM, wrote:

Hi,

My name is Robert Drury, and I am a software developer.

I need to use your software for a project I am currently working on and my laptop has a very moderately powered processor. I have searched your site thoroughly and can find the system requirements for your program nowhere. It is very inconvenient to me and all developers like myself. I kindly request that you please post these on your website as these statistics are very important to many people and would further advance the ease of use of your product.

I'm not sure how this can ease the use of GIMP when common sense suggests that getting newer hardware should help :) But the request is valid. What page would you expect to see this information on?

Alexandre

On 10/23/2013 04:16 AM, thewall01210@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

My name is Robert Drury, and I am a software developer.

I need to use your software for a project I am currently working on and my laptop has a very moderately powered processor. I have searched your site thoroughly and can find the system requirements for your program nowhere. It is very inconvenient to me and all developers like myself. I kindly request that you please post these on your website as these statistics are very important to many people and would further advance the ease of use of your product.

The system requirements depend a lot on the kind of images your process and how fast you want this to happen. Roughly any machine big enough to run WinXP can run Gimp... I'm software developer myself and a PC big enough to efficiently run what I need for this (IDEs, compilers...) is more than enough for Gimp.

On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 10:16 PM, wrote:

Hi,

My name is Robert Drury, and I am a software developer.

I need to use your software for a project I am currently working on and my laptop has a very moderately powered processor.

I've been using Gimp since the days of the r4000 and 486. I learned it on a machine that had 8MB-- that's MB not GB-- of RAM.

You need memory and disk proportional to the size of the images you're manipulating. You need processor proportional to the kinds of editing you're doing. There is no hard minimum, and no clearly demarcated lines.

I have searched your site thoroughly and can find the system requirements for your program nowhere.

"If it can boot a graphical display, it can probably run GIMP"

It is very inconvenient to me and all developers like myself. I kindly request that you please post these on your website as these statistics are very important to many people and would further advance the ease of use of your product.

Do you have something specific in mind?

Monty

Hi. I'm a graphic designer, and I use GIMP as my main photo-editing software. I've edited 23 megapixel images on my Netbook (1.5Ghz dual core, 2GB RAM), running Ubuntu, and found that a lot of factors contribute to how fast GIMP runs. For example, if I switch to XFCE as a window manager, GIMP runs about twice as fast as in Unity (as of 12.04). It is usable in both, however. Also, certain tools become unwieldy over a certain image size. One can for example use the cage transform tool on very large images, but depending on the image size and number of nodes you use, it's going to crawl... even on really good hardware. Also, things like having a good graphics card helps tremendously, but on laptops, all you can really do is max out the RAM, which also helps tremendously.

The main reason software companies list minimum requirements is because they are selling commercially packaged software that you often have to buy to get the full version, and you can not return once the seal is broken. With GIMP, you just download it and try it out to see if it fits your needs. There is no consumer risk involved with doing this, and since several people mentioned above, GIMP will run on just about anything that can run a GUI, there is no "minimum". If all you are doing is making interface graphics for your software, composed of 1920x1080 user interface screenshots, GIMP should be lightning fast for most things (but also depends on how many layers you have, and how large each one is).

Things like the perspective tool can get really slow if your graphics card isn't any good, and if your photo is really big.

Maybe someone can toss together a benchmarking plugin that takes some sample images, and processes them in various ways and produces a "user experience" rating, sort of like the one Windows uses to tell you they've helped sell you something that's no good for running Windows, but to be honest I'd rather see that progress go towards making tools faster, easier to use, etc. I'm really excited about the upcoming unified transform tool for example.
If you want something a lot faster for program UI design, you might check out Inkscape for the construction, then just output whatever resolutions you need. I design websites UIs this way.

Hope it helps.

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 8:31 AM, Bertrand Denoix < bertrand.denoix@laposte.net> wrote:

On 10/23/2013 04:16 AM, thewall01210@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

My name is Robert Drury, and I am a software developer.

I need to use your software for a project I am currently working on and my laptop has a very moderately powered processor. I have searched your site thoroughly and can find the system requirements for your program nowhere. It is very inconvenient to me and all developers like myself. I kindly request that you please post these on your website as these statistics are very important to many people and would further advance the ease of use of your product.

The system requirements depend a lot on the kind of images your process and how fast you want this to happen. Roughly any machine big enough to run WinXP can run Gimp... I'm software developer myself and a PC big enough to efficiently run what I need for this (IDEs, compilers...) is more than enough for Gimp.

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El 23/10/13 18:52, C R escribi:

Things like the perspective tool can get really slow if your graphics card isn't any good, and if your photo is really big.

Does GIMP use any hardware acceleration on transform tools? Iirc it doesn't, but I might be wrong.

Gez.

On 10/23/2013 05:52 PM, C R wrote:

With GIMP, you just download it and try it out to see if it fits your needs. There is no consumer risk involved with doing this....

While I am in agreement with virtually everything you have said... I beg to differ with the point about "no consumer risk". Over the years, I have "lost" days of my life to such "try it and see if it works for me" situations. To _me_ there is a very high "consumer risk". I know that nothing is perfect and even paying lots of money usually does not mean that there is "no consumer risk" in terms of time. However, if (ha!) I knew FOR SURE (ha!) in advance that my choice was a) a couple of days of testing and struggling vs b) paying a few hundred dollars, I would rather pay the few hundred dollars.

Maybe someone can toss together a benchmarking plugin that takes some sample images, and processes them in various ways and produces a "user experience" rating...

That is a really good idea. It would be even more useful if combined that with a web page where testers then post their results in a very structured manner including information about their specific hardware, etc. Thus other potential users can see in advance how a specific Gimp version works in a specific environment. (Or are there still too many variables?)

Jay

On Wed, 23 Oct 2013 18:16:35 -0400, Jay Smith wrote:

On 10/23/2013 05:52 PM, C R wrote:

With GIMP, you just download it and try it out to see if it fits your needs. There is no consumer risk involved with doing this....

While I am in agreement with virtually everything you have said... I beg to differ with the point about "no consumer risk". Over the years, I have "lost" days of my life to such "try it and see if it works for me" situations. To _me_ there is a very high "consumer risk". I know that nothing is perfect and even paying lots of money usually does not mean that there is "no consumer risk" in terms of time. However, if (ha!) I knew FOR SURE (ha!) in advance that my choice was a) a couple of days of testing and struggling vs b) paying a few hundred dollars, I would rather pay the few hundred dollars.

The problem -- and this is more so with GIMP than with many apps -- is that it really comes down to what you want to do and your level of patience. If you're using it on web images (maybe 1 MP or less), you're not doing anything fancy, and you're running a light weight desktop, particularly on an older distribution, you might be perfectly happy with 256 MB of memory and a Pentium 3 processor. If you're working on multi-layer 50 megapixel images, and you're doing a lot of transforms, you might find even 8 GB unpleasant.

I'd be pretty confident in saying that you're not going to be happy with GIMP on a s typically less variation in document size. I have some spreadsheets in the 10 MB range, but this is very big for a spreadsheet and corresponds to no more than a 20 MP image with a single layer; plenty of people work with images that dwarf this.

Maybe someone can toss together a benchmarking plugin that takes some sample images, and processes them in various ways and produces a "user experience" rating...

That is a really good idea. It would be even more useful if combined that with a web page where testers then post their results in a very structured manner including information about their specific hardware, etc. Thus other potential users can see in advance how a specific Gimp version works in a specific environment. (Or are there still too many variables?)

Yes, there are. There's so much variation in image size, and what people do, out there that none of this would be of any general value at all.

Robert Krawitz                                     

MIT VI-3 1987 - Congrats MIT Engineers 5 straight men's hoops tourney
Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom  --  http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton

El 23/10/13 20:57, Robert Krawitz escribi:

The problem -- and this is more so with GIMP than with many apps -- is that it really comes down to what you want to do and your level of patience. If you're using it on web images (maybe 1 MP or less), you're not doing anything fancy, and you're running a light weight desktop, particularly on an older distribution, you might be perfectly happy with 256 MB of memory and a Pentium 3 processor. If you're working on multi-layer 50 megapixel images, and you're doing a lot of transforms, you might find even 8 GB unpleasant.

I agree with Robert's comment.
I use GIMP for my everyday graphic design job, and I think that something around 4 GB of RAM is generally enough for most of the simple tasks needed (cutting out images, doing simple comps, banners, color correction, etc), even in 20 or 30 MP images. However it's true that such amount of memory falls short pretty quickly when you start working on complex compositions with several layers, masks and large images. I use all the 8GB of RAM available in this box pretty frequently, so it's hard to tell how much memory is "enough".

It depends on the work you'll be doing. If a general, non-specialized user asks me about how much memory is fine, I'd say something between 2 and 4 GB should be enough.
But if you're an artist or a designer, then I'd say the sky is the limit :-) As much RAM as you and your motherboard can afford is the right amount.

Gez