While I am not a Gimp developer, I've been a keen user for many years. Same goes for Inkscape. After having to do some native work on iOS, I started working on Macs. In addition new laptop offerings kept making life as a linux user harder and harder. Touch screen, sexy new form factors, pens? At the same time, doing linuxy things on Macs became easier and easier, to the point that I know do most development on Macs, deploying on Linux where approriate.

I've waited years for Gimp and Inkscape to support Macs, but sadly they still don't. They barely "run", but they aren't usable. I wrote a blog post with the details:

https://medium.com/@kjeldahl/gimp-and-inkscape-on-retina-macs-do-not-work-9601c3052e86#.i3ys9rmhn

So to your question, what's the point?

IMHO, the point is that Gimp and Inkscape are excellent FREE offerings within their genres. Unfortunately, neither works on Macs (I know little about Windows). Until they support Macs (and possibly Windows), Gimp and Inkscape usage will be limited to current Linux users. Yes, I'm aware of the underlying technical reasons WHY support is poor, but that doesn't change the fact that neither Gimp or Inkscape has any chance as becoming a real offering outside of the Linux user base, and people not using Linux will keep asking that question. :-)

Thanks,

Marius K.

On Fri, 23 Sep 2016 at 13:20 C R wrote:

I run a London Linux Meet, where a bunch of Linux and open source folks have drinks and discuss Linux, and free software.

At the last meet I was showing off GIMP, as I often do when asked "what do you do?" There's the usual ooohing and ahhing as I show what GIMP allows me to do easily as a designer.

This time, I got a strange comment from a new visitor to our group. He said "GIMP development? What's the point of that?" in a rather sarcastic tone.

In such cases I have to push down my annoyance with the tone and answer the question properly, because I know such comments usually come from one of two places:

a) User has tried GIMP, but didn't take time to learn enough to get past things that aren't obvious.
b) User has heard that GIMP is hard to use, and is not an adequate tool for professionals.

Both of these point of views are skewed, but I find all it takes is a short walk-through and sometimes question answering about how to do what they want. Most people just want a show, though. Someone to prove to them that their preconceptions of GIMP are incorrect, or at least incomplete.

In this case, I opted to give the fireworks/show. My weapons of choice this time included the unified transform tool, the handle-transform tool, and the warp transform tool-
"Without development, we (designers/users) would not have these new features, which will be released in the next version, and are available now via the gimp-edge repo."

I love the change in expression. You can SEE the change from the sceptical arm-foldedness, to hands-on hips, or chin-scratching that indicated not only a change in perspective, but also imagining the possibilities.

"Without dedicated people constantly working to improve GIMP, we would not have any of this, and nothing to look forward to. It's an incredible gift, and allows us to work with complete freedom. It's there for the taking, for the enjoyment of everyone. All one has to do is reach for it with patience that is necessary for learning (any) complex and extremely powerful graphics application."

I just wanted to again say thanks, and relay that even on days where it seems no one has anything good to say about GIMP, you've got fans who genuinely appreciate the work you do, and believe in what GIMP is, and enjoy what it will become in the future with your tremendous efforts.

You're presently causing ooohs and ahhhs, in London. :)

The question: "What's the point?" is a curious one. As a developer in the project, what are your reasons for working on GIMP? What are your motivations? What do you enjoy most about it?

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On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 4:14 PM, Marius Kjeldahl wrote:

I've waited years for Gimp and Inkscape to support Macs, but sadly they still don't. They barely "run", but they aren't usable.

IMHO, the point is that Gimp and Inkscape are excellent FREE offerings within their genres. Unfortunately, neither works on Macs (I know little about Windows). Until they support Macs (and possibly Windows), Gimp and Inkscape usage will be limited to current Linux users.

I wonder where all this tendency to make loud generalized statements comes from.

Alex

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 9:14 AM, Marius Kjeldahl wrote:

...
I've waited years for Gimp and Inkscape to support Macs, but sadly they still don't. They barely "run", but they aren't usable. I wrote a blog post with the details:

https://medium.com/@kjeldahl/gimp-and-inkscape-on-retina- macs-do-not-work-9601c3052e86#.i3ys9rmhn

So to your question, what's the point?

Can you tell me what's missing in the Mac GIMP support? I've been providing Mac (and WIndows) builds for a long time and continuing to so.

Doesn't the linked blog post explain it already?

Thanks,

Marius K.

On Fri, 23 Sep 2016 at 15:24 Partha Bagchi wrote:

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 9:14 AM, Marius Kjeldahl < marius.kjeldahl@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I've waited years for Gimp and Inkscape to support Macs, but sadly they still don't. They barely "run", but they aren't usable. I wrote a blog post
with the details:

https://medium.com/@kjeldahl/gimp-and-inkscape-on-retina-macs-do-not-work-9601c3052e86#.i3ys9rmhn

So to your question, what's the point?

Can you tell me what's missing in the Mac GIMP support? I've been providing Mac (and WIndows) builds for a long time and continuing to so.

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 4:25 PM, Marius Kjeldahl wrote:

Doesn't the linked blog post explain it already?

The blog post, among other things, states this:

"Gimp and Inkscape ... both claim to support retina/hidpi displays"

I dare you link to pages on gimp.org and inkscape.org that support this claim.

Alex

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 09:24:50AM -0400, Partha Bagchi wrote:

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 9:14 AM, Marius Kjeldahl wrote:

...
I've waited years for Gimp and Inkscape to support Macs, but sadly they still don't. They barely "run", but they aren't usable. I wrote a blog post with the details:

https://medium.com/@kjeldahl/gimp-and-inkscape-on-retina- macs-do-not-work-9601c3052e86#.i3ys9rmhn

So to your question, what's the point?

Can you tell me what's missing in the Mac GIMP support? I've been providing Mac (and WIndows) builds for a long time and continuing to so.

If you read his blog, he calls it out pretty explicitly (I read it because, I've been using inkscape heavily on Mac the last week or so).

tl;dr GTK2 on a retina display sucks because it isn't handling the hight DPI properly. When Inkscape/GIMP get ported to GTK3, his complaint hopefully disappears.

Jeff

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over 
 the man who cannot read them."
 -- Mark Twain

I see. I haven't noticed any ill-effects of using my GIMP build on my Macbook pros Mid 2014 (retina display). But that's me.

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 9:26 AM, Maurizio Loreti wrote:

On 23 set 2016, at 15:24, Partha Bagchi wrote:

Can you tell me what's missing in the Mac GIMP support? I've been

providing

Mac (and WIndows) builds for a long time and continuing to so.

I think he is speaking about the lack of support for retina displays.

-- Maurizio Loreti - Maurizio.Loreti@gmail.com

inkscape.org states it's a professional editor for Mac OS X. Care to guess which Macs most professionals use?

The same claim is made on gimp.org: "Gimp ... sophisticated tools to get the your job done."

So if you want to be pedantic, sure, no claim is made about HIDPI support. So I guess you are right. That doesn't help the rest of people who try out gimp and inkscape and everything looks like shit.

Enjoy your victorious moment! ;-)

Thanks,

Marius K.

On Fri, 23 Sep 2016 at 15:31 Alexandre Prokoudine < alexandre.prokoudine@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 4:25 PM, Marius Kjeldahl wrote:

Doesn't the linked blog post explain it already?

The blog post, among other things, states this:

"Gimp and Inkscape ... both claim to support retina/hidpi displays"

I dare you link to pages on gimp.org and inkscape.org that support this claim.

Alex
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On September 23, 2016 3:25:33 PM GMT+02:00, Marius Kjeldahl wrote:

Doesn't the linked blog post explain it already?

So the tl;dr is: there is no support for retina display (or other high dpi displays).

Or did I miss any other kissues in the post?

Regards,
Michael

AFAIK, on Inkscape things just looks a bit uglier. On Gimp, it's either lose half the pixels, OR view everything at 2x zoomed. No way to grab parts of a screen and view it next to the original on the same screen without losing half the pixels. That'a a pretty major issue IMHO. And to be honest, I lived through many mysteriously blurred images before I realized what was going on. On photos it may not be noticeable, but on screengrabs it certainly is.

Thanks,

Marius K.

On Fri, 23 Sep 2016 at 15:41 Michael Schumacher wrote:

On September 23, 2016 3:25:33 PM GMT+02:00, Marius Kjeldahl < marius.kjeldahl@gmail.com> wrote:

Doesn't the linked blog post explain it already?

So the tl;dr is: there is no support for retina display (or other high dpi displays).

Or did I miss any other kissues in the post?

-- Regards,
Michael
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On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 4:36 PM, Marius Kjeldahl wrote:

inkscape.org states it's a professional editor for Mac OS X. Care to guess which Macs most professionals use?

The same claim is made on gimp.org: "Gimp ... sophisticated tools to get the your job done."

So if you want to be pedantic

Calling out for knowingly false statements is now considered pedantic? yay, we are getting somewhere.

Alex

On Fri, 2016-09-23 at 12:19 +0100, C R wrote:

[...]

I just wanted to again say thanks, and relay that even on days where it
seems no one has anything good to say about GIMP, you've got fans who genuinely appreciate the work you do, and believe in what GIMP is, and
enjoy what it will become in the future with your tremendous efforts.

It's good to hear feedback like this, even if (sadly) it generated a negative thread... and even that had the message "I want to use GIMP and can't" and not "I don't want to use GIMP" which overall seems positive.

Liam [ankh]

Liam R. E. Quin 

Sorry if you don't get the issue. It's not about simply zooming out.

Also, my apologies about hijacking. I thought you wanted to know why most people don't care about Gimp. Many people who try do not realize why things look bad in Gimp when they try it (compared to every other editor on Macs), so even if you impress your abilities it may no reflect what others are experiencing.

I'll shut up for now, just thought it was an important issue to understand. Most people do not.

Thanks,

Marius K.

On Fri, 23 Sep 2016 at 15:57 C R wrote:

AFAIK, on Inkscape things just looks a bit uglier. On Gimp, it's either

lose half the pixels, OR view everything at 2x zoomed.

So... zooming OUT is out of the question for some strange reason? :P

(snip)

I lived through many mysteriously blurred images before I realized what was

going on. On photos it may not be noticeable, but on screengrabs it certainly is.

As a professional user, you use many screen-grabs in your work? Not saying it's not an issue... but a "pretty major issue"... yea, no. Doesn't sound like it to me.

Also, it must be a Mac-only issue, because I've used GIMP on a 4K Dell XPS 13 screen which annihilates the resolution on "retina" Macbooks, and it was crisp as hell. No pixel doubling. Only issue is you had to zoom in a lot because the pixels are so tiny. This was running Linux though. Maybe we're just lucky? Inkscape had a worse time of the 4K screen because it has to re-draw all the shapes. It was really slow, but DPI scaling cured it. More pixels = more processor overhead. Ymmv.

Thanks for hijacking my email thread to complain about your user issue, btw.
-C

Thanks,

Marius K.

On Fri, 23 Sep 2016 at 15:41 Michael Schumacher wrote:

On September 23, 2016 3:25:33 PM GMT+02:00, Marius Kjeldahl < marius.kjeldahl@gmail.com> wrote:

Doesn't the linked blog post explain it already?

So the tl;dr is: there is no support for retina display (or other high

dpi

displays).

Or did I miss any other kissues in the post?

-- Regards,
Michael
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On September 23, 2016 3:44:47 PM GMT+02:00, Marius Kjeldahl wrote:

AFAIK, on Inkscape things just looks a bit uglier. On Gimp, it's either lose half the pixels, OR view everything at 2x zoomed. No way to grab parts of a screen and view it next to the original on the same screen without losing half the pixels. That'a a pretty major issue IMHO.

Yeah, we got this reported as https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=725263

Basically, it seems as if moving to GTK+ 3 is the only real way out; this is planned for the GIMP 3.0 release.

Regards,
Michael

At the last meet I was showing off GIMP, as I often do when asked "what do you do?" There's the usual ooohing and ahhing as I show what GIMP allows me to do easily as a designer.

This time, I got a strange comment from a new visitor to our group. He said "GIMP development? What's the point of that?" in a rather sarcastic tone.

The question: "What's the point?" is a curious one. As a developer in the project, what are your reasons for working on GIMP? What are your motivations? What do you enjoy most about it?

You made some assumptions about what might have prompted such a question BUT did you actually ask them why they felt it necessary to ask? I'm sure it would be useful to know the basis for such an opinion, which could then be addressed directly.

Kevin

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 01:14:38PM +0000, Marius Kjeldahl wrote:

While I am not a Gimp developer, I've been a keen user for many years. Same goes for Inkscape. After having to do some native work on iOS, I started working on Macs. In addition new laptop offerings kept making life as a linux user harder and harder. Touch screen, sexy new form factors, pens? At the same time, doing linuxy things on Macs became easier and easier, to the point that I know do most development on Macs, deploying on Linux where approriate.

I've waited years for Gimp and Inkscape to support Macs, but sadly they still don't. They barely "run", but they aren't usable. I wrote a blog post with the details:

https://medium.com/@kjeldahl/gimp-and-inkscape-on-retina-macs-do-not-work-9601c3052e86#.i3ys9rmhn

So to your question, what's the point?

Under Windows and Linux GIMP works almost flawlessly and that is more than 80% of PC or more in the world.

And you can always use Linux in dual boot or in a virtual machine on a mac and those both methods cure definitely all that MacOSX problem, meanwhile waiting for the GTK3 definitive solution of course...

So the point is really "who cares about (some) OSX (users)"?

Please add my MANY THANKS TO DEVS! to the list...

Marco Ciampa

I know a joke about UDP, but you might not get it.

------------------------

 GNU/Linux User #78271
 FSFE fellow #364

------------------------

Hi C R!

(or in the spirit of Talk Like a Pirate Day - "High Sea, arrrrrrrrrrr!".)

On Fri, 23 Sep 2016 12:19:54 +0100 C R wrote:

I run a London Linux Meet, where a bunch of Linux and open source folks have drinks and discuss Linux, and free software.

At the last meet I was showing off GIMP, as I often do when asked "what do you do?" There's the usual ooohing and ahhing as I show what GIMP allows me to do easily as a designer.

This time, I got a strange comment from a new visitor to our group. He said "GIMP development? What's the point of that?" in a rather sarcastic tone.

In such cases I have to push down my annoyance with the tone and answer the question properly, because I know such comments usually come from one of two places:

a) User has tried GIMP, but didn't take time to learn enough to get past things that aren't obvious.
b) User has heard that GIMP is hard to use, and is not an adequate tool for professionals.

Both of these point of views are skewed, but I find all it takes is a short walk-through and sometimes question answering about how to do what they want. Most people just want a show, though. Someone to prove to them that their preconceptions of GIMP are incorrect, or at least incomplete.

In this case, I opted to give the fireworks/show. My weapons of choice this time included the unified transform tool, the handle-transform tool, and the warp transform tool-
"Without development, we (designers/users) would not have these new features, which will be released in the next version, and are available now via the gimp-edge repo."

I love the change in expression. You can SEE the change from the sceptical arm-foldedness, to hands-on hips, or chin-scratching that indicated not only a change in perspective, but also imagining the possibilities.

"Without dedicated people constantly working to improve GIMP, we would not have any of this, and nothing to look forward to. It's an incredible gift, and allows us to work with complete freedom. It's there for the taking, for the enjoyment of everyone. All one has to do is reach for it with patience that is necessary for learning (any) complex and extremely powerful graphics application."

I just wanted to again say thanks, and relay that even on days where it seems no one has anything good to say about GIMP, you've got fans who genuinely appreciate the work you do, and believe in what GIMP is, and enjoy what it will become in the future with your tremendous efforts.

You're presently causing ooohs and ahhhs, in London. :)

The question: "What's the point?" is a curious one. As a developer in the project, what are your reasons for working on GIMP? What are your motivations? What do you enjoy most about it?

Well, it's been a while since I've intensively worked on GIMP, but I'll give it a shot. First of all, I'd like to answer the question why I am a proponent of FOSS. I find a lot of open source software cool and useful and in addition I had a bad experience with a certain proprietary software app (BitKeeper) that ended up becoming unavailable to me, and as a result decided to try to avoid proprietary software in the future as much as possible. I've written about it here -
https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/261w6v/why_i_do_not_trust_nonfoss_and_why_you_shouldnt/ .

Since I like and prefer FOSS, and am a capable software developer (including in programming) I like to spend my time to improve it or otherwise promote it, in order to make it better and more popular. I covered my motivation and mentality in this post -
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il/msg56378.html .

Now naturally, I found some benefits in contributing to GIMP and other open source projects: enhancing my skills as a software dev, getting code review, acquiring some peer repute and recognition, enhancing existing code, having fun, interacting with fellow developers, etc.

One fact that I feel had held GIMP back is the fact that the more core developers replied in a relatively rude and unfriendly manner to many people (and potential contributors) who asked questions or otherwise contacted us on the mailing lists. Someone pointed that out to me in private and I eventually made a public post pointing this out, but by then many potential contributors were driven away. Since then it seems that the situation has greatly improved.

Anyway, I contributed to GIMP because it's a useful open source project which I find of utility, and am not aware of a superior FOSS alternative. I hope I can dedicate some time in the future to contribute some more, and encourage other software developers (not necessarily programmers) to contribute to it as well.

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

-C
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http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/Google-Discontinues-Services/

He who reinvents the wheel, will understand much better how a wheel works.

Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .

On 23.09.2016 17:41, Marco Ciampa wrote:

So the point is really "who cares about (some) OSX (users)"?

You are kidding, aren't you?

When looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems linux does not even register as a desktop OS.

And no, I have never possessed a Mac, never will do so voluntarily and I am not forced to do so ATM. I've been using Debian or Ubuntu for the last 12 years exclusively at home an as much as I could in the office.

But I feel that it is wrong to ignore or even affront possible users in a project that claims to be "open" and is considered by many one of the shining examples of the free and open software movement.

With kind regards

Stefan Peter

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style for details)

On September 23, 2016 5:41:02 PM GMT+02:00, Marco Ciampa wrote:

So the point is really "who cares about (some) OSX (users)"?

We care about supporting platforms if there are people whom we get contribution from - be it contributed code, high-quality bug reports and enhancement requests, effort to get binary packages built, ...

In a way, you could say we care about platforms if some of their users care enough about GIMP to help us care about them.

Regards, 
Michael

Hi, C!

On Fri, 23 Sep 2016 18:45:58 +0100 C R wrote:

Hi Shlomi! Thanks for weighing in, and for sharing your motivations. Also thanks for your past contributions and I too hope you can once again find time to contribute to GIMP in the future. I found your articles quite informative, and I like your comment about the Tinfoil hat (What Linus said about SHA1 security was quite amusing). http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/show.cgi?id=linus-about-security-of-sha1

Hehehe.

You're welcome.

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

Cheers.
-C

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http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/Can-I-SCO-Now/ - “Can I SCO Now?”

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On Friday, September 23, 2016, 15:31:18, Jeffrey Brent McBeth wrote:

GTK2 on a retina display sucks because it isn't handling the hight DPI properly. When Inkscape/GIMP get ported to GTK3, his complaint hopefully disappears.

I've got a 5k monitor on my Windows machine now, and after installing the Color-48 theme from
,
GIMP is completely usable (maybe the theme could be shipped with GIMP to address this issue?). It's not perfect - the spinbuttons are very narrow, and checkboxes are small, but the rest of the elements work fine.

< Jernej Simoni ><><><><>< http://eternallybored.org/ >

The fact that you do not know the answer does not mean that someone else does.
       -- Stein's Maxim

From: gimp-developer-list on behalf of Jernej Simoni > Sent: 27 September 2016 08:13
To: Jeffrey Brent McBeth on [gimp-developer-list] Subject: Re: [Gimp-developer] GIMP development- What's the point?

I've got a 5k monitor on my Windows machine now, and after installing the Color-48 theme from
,
GIMP is completely usable (maybe the theme could be shipped with GIMP to address this issue?). It's not perfect - the spinbuttons are very narrow, and checkboxes are small, but the rest of the elements work fine.

< Jernej Simoni ><><><><>< http://eternallybored.org/ >

Jernej,
As I don't have a high density display and was therefore not able to finish the themes properly, would you like to take ownership and complete the job?

Kevin

On 10. oktober 2016, 11:28:11, Kevin Payne wrote:

As I don't have a high density display and was therefore not able to finish the themes properly, would you like to take ownership and complete the job?

I never actually tried doing any styling, but looking at the GTK+ documentation, it appears that one of my complaints (spinbutton thickness) apparently can't be fixed (and looking at a normal-density screen, the arrows are very narrow there, too, at least with the MS-Windows theme), while the checkboxes can be fixed by adding

GtkCheckButton::indicator-size = 20 GtkRadioButton::indicator-size = 20

The rest of the theme is fine as far as I can see (except I'd probably comment out the font_name = "sans, 11" line, and let the MS-Windows theme take care of this - at least on Windows; I've no idea if this is needed on *nix).

< Jernej Simončič ><><><><>< http://eternallybored.org/ >

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
       -- Bucy's Law