Ah so this is how I find out. Sweet.
FUCK
That’s why open source rules
I love FOSS but GIMP and Inkscape aren’t nearly as usable or feature rich as the Affinity suite, let alone the Adobe suite.
Man i just hate these comments. Imagine you’re gimp / foss developer and you see an uncritical, unactionable, and dumbass comment about how a multimillion dollar company beats your software. Like of course mate Affinity & Adobe developers get money thrown at them, while gimp developers have to stand your ungrateful ass.
GIMP is a special case. GIMP is being getting outdeveloped by Krita these days. E.g.:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9284
Or compare with:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Krita-2024-GPUs-AI
GIMP had its share of self inflicted wounds starting with a toxic mailing list that drove away people from professional VFX and surrounding FilmGimp/CinePaint. When the GIMP people subsequently took over the GEGL development from Rhythm & Hues, it took literally 15 years until it barely worked.
Now we are past the era of simple GPU processing into diffusion models/“generative AI” and GIMP is barely keeping up with simple GPU processing (like resizing, see above).
From what I understand, GIMP fell behind because it refused corporate donations while Krita accepted them. This lead to GIMP reducing in scope as the 1-3 part-time developers (at least when I last really looked into it) realised they’d never catch up, leading to people donating less as they weren’t satisfied with GIMP’s simultaneous underpromising and underdelivering. Meanwhile Krita managed to receive enough money to hire a team of full time developers for several years, leading to better software, to more donations. It’s like the poverty trap, but with software.
I just installed gimpshop the other day on a whim and immediately I could work at 90% capacity just based 20+ years of Photoshop muscle memory. Gimp never lasted more than a day with me the dozen or so times I’ve tried it before.
There are ways to make it work, and the tooling out there is getting better every day.
Looks like it’s last official version was released in 2007. Are you using a version from gimpshop.com with added adware/spyware? The wiki for gimpshop is pretty eye-opening…
I originally created Gimpshop, but I’m not the jerk who owns that domain and added adware & spyware to the source. Sorry about that. I hate that this guy is out there making my fun little project into an abomination.
I had no clue about this. Thanks for the heads up. Not sure which one I installed but it’s on my test machine and I can check tomorrow
‘It doesn’t meet my needs’ seems like light criticism but I understand your point. I’m eternally thankful to devs but at a certain point it either does what you need or it doesn’t.
Y’all gimp developers need to grow a pair
I use a lot of open source apps which aren’t as polished, the UIs need work, they’re clunky, and they won’t enshittify.
Yeah and there’s just as many paid for programs with the same issues… What’s your point? Want me to show you some open source programs that are polished? Heard of blender before? That’s not the point I was making anyway… The issue with non foss software is that you have ZERO control over it. Big corporations can decide to drop support at any moment or make a free tier paid.
Allow me to reiterate:
I use a lot of open source apps…and they won’t enshittify.
Canva’s UI is somehow more fiddly than Word for making edits, but they’ve always seemed like a pretty decent company to me.
…of course that only holds true until it doesn’t - I’m looking at you, Google.
Subscriptions, here we come! You can’t trust any commercial software company.
I remember Pocket Casts tried to take away lifetime purchases until people complained about it and they went ‘fuck it’ and gave people memberships that lasted 100 years or something. They did it before they had time to rebrand it as a ‘Lifetime Member’ in the GUI so good on them for fixing it so fast I guess.
I love it as an app but I’m not sure what it’s like for new users that can’t get lifetime memberships.
I bought pocket casts for like $4 a very long time ago. I’m not sure what you’re talking about, and the app says I have a free account. What is the difference in buying the app and subscribing to it?
I only came along after Google podcasts announced that it was sunsetting, so I don’t know what the lifetime membership entailed. But I have no need for any of the paid features they offer, so I’m happy to remain a free member. I don’t really understand why I would need cloud storage… from my podcast app… and on pc, I just run the Pocket Cast app in an Android emulator since for some reason you can’t use a web browser without a subscription. Completely mystifying decision, but I’m not paying $4 a month for it.
I use cloud storage for audiobooks. It syncs my progress across devices. That’s the reason I bought the app (and got lifetime subscription later).
Oh very cool - that’s a very good use case that I hadn’t considered!
What Android emulator are you using?
I remember I tried one for macOS before but I wasn’t happy with the performance, I did try it for the Tivimate I think, but it was choppy and not worth to use, I was gonna go back to experiment about this it would be because of Pocket Casts for sure.
I just loaded up Android Studio, which has it’s own emulation layer. I’ve tried Bluestacks in the past and had trouble with it - figured that Google’s own environment would be the best option.
Hmm, I see, I’m gonna look into this surely!
I learned my lesson about ‘lifetime’ updates with a Tom Tom GPS unit, from the late '90s, maybe early 2000s. After about 4 or 5 years I couldn’t install the latest map updates, so I contacted CS. They said, “Oh yeah, lifetime means the time of the expected life of the unit, which is 4.5 years. We don’t support that model anymore. Any other questions?”
I’ve bought VPN lifetime several times, 2 of them have disappeared, 2 are still running. On the other hand, just think about it from the company point of view, lifetime support is not a sustainable business model, so it necessarily must be a scam.
I bought one on sale for 20 bucks like 9 years ago. It’s still running, though it’s not a particularly great VPN. Performance is meh, the clients are really basic. I still use it because after this long it’s basically free
If my Windscribe Lifetime VPN eventually disappears, I’ll of course be pretty upset. However, for the 35 bucks I paid for it in 2016 I feel like I’ve received an amazing value.
Nah not necessarily. It can be a great way to get money early on without venture capital.
Yeah, you will have to provide the service to them forever but they are usually a small bunch so they aren’t a big deal if you manage to get big later on.
I suspect most companies that offer lifetime even when they are big have statistics showing that they lose little money or none because the high price means that the average consumer won’t use the service for the required amount of years to break even.
Yeah, it’s kind of like crowd-funding. The early customers get a great deal, but also have the risk of the company going out of business.
Fuck
Lionel Hutz: Mr. Simpson, this is the most blatant case of fraudulent advertising since my suit against the film, “The Never-Ending Story”
That’s totally inappropriate. It’s lewd, lascivious, salacious, outrageous. - Jackie Chiles
I bought a lifetime license for Malwarebytes back in 2012 and I’m shocked that they still honor it to this day. I feel like it’s only a matter of time before I lose it.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
It’s my old go-to whenever I accidentally downloaded something nasty that AVG (back when it was actually okay) couldn’t find. Are they actually still good?
Gold standard free antivirus these days (and by that I mean the only one that isn’t useless)
I see so many ads for malware bytes that it almost looks like malware itself lol. I’m pretty sure they have a lot of money.
I’m pretty sure they have a lot of money.
Yes but not all of the monies. - Every single MBA ever to curse the earth with their presence.
Hell, I bought a hex editor with lifetime lic back in 1996. The fucking guy answered my email and sent me an upgrade almost 30 years later. Hats off to you.
this is why we need FOSS
GIMP or Krita might not be up to the standard as Affinity and Photoshop are, but at least while perfecting my skills in GIMP, I don’t have to worry about having to find a different software because a random company purchases it.
People who claim GIMP isn’t up to Photoshop inevitably reveal the only actual issue is that they learned photoshop first.
I used GIMP first and then Photopea (basically photoshop but web app) and GIMP is worse despite using it first. It’s just bad.
Even more so, you don’t have to worry about hardware support, since they can be compiled from source code, as long as you have pc with enough power to run it, you can run it, no matter which architecture
I really wish I liked gimp but I hate it so much. It’s so unintuitive it actually hurts every time I use it
That’s what I used to think as well actually. I opened it, saw the airplane control center, and closed it. But then I volunteered for editing a photo for my school, and I had to learn how to effectively create borders around the text, as I would have to makes a lot of changes to them. So I searched and came across this video. And then I understood that GIMP is actually a really powerful tool, you just have to learn how the developers intended you to work with it. Admittedly, having to use the drop shadow feature for text borders is pretty retarded, but it lets you fine tune the how the end result will look.
Yea, people don’t like it simply because they’re not used to it.
For instance, Cntrl-A, select all. Cntrl-Shift-A is a way more intuitive way to deselect all.
It’s the same reason people complain about OnlyOffice, which is stellar.
I’ve become used to an alt modifier being typically negative and shift positive so ctrl+alt+a would be more like the unselect all and shift would add to a selection (though I guess you can’t add more to the selection after “all”)
I love open office. Partially true though with gimp. I just loathe how it does layers and I hate how the tools and shortcut keys are. Some of the most common design patterns are completely ignored. Unintuitive design is unintuitive design, even if you get used to it.
OnlyOffice is different from OpenOffice. And OpenOffice nowadays is poorly mainted, it has been forked a while back to LibreOffice
Yeah I meant libre office actually. Only office I’m not familiar with.
I think I just learnt about only office. Been using libre office for a while, might switch!
I’ll give the video a watch but yeah I’ve used it countless times at this point. Doing extremely basic things like adding text to a document is painful for me due to the extremely weird way layers and selection works. Not to mention basic stuff like zoom shortcut keys standard everywhere else do not work.
We’re not using that word are we!
Iphone has always been pitched as intuitive and “it just works”, and it seems like it is that way for iphone users.
But when I try using one I’m lost as hell. It seems God awful. In other words, intuitive is whatever you’re used to.
It’s not just what you are used to, but yes that can play a role. I think apple gets a pass because of the image they have. My mom has an iphone and struggles with anything new or changed on it. But people told her it’s the easiest phone so she’ll never switch…
I say it’s “easy” because you have so little say in what you can do with it.
I feel the same about Krita. I used it for about a year of hobbyist drawing, and I just never could get comfortable using it.
Clip Studio Paint came out with 3.0, and after some deliberation I decided to pay for the update. Felt like coming home. I’ve done more art in two weeks than I’ve done in nearly a year of using Krita.
Buying a lifetime license, also known as… buying.
Products aren’t services.
The service is the developers releasing bug fixes and features that should have been there to begin with.
As a programmer, I cannot throw that stone. Software is hard.
But leaving software alone is the easiest thing in the world.
even if they keep lifetime licenses for now, it’s blatantly obvious how Canva plans to use Embrace, Extend, Extinguish to move people to a subscription service for newer releases.
If adobe can do it with Photoshop et al. without losing its brand reputation, then Affinity will follow suit in due course.
Yep, they’ll probably stop updating the Affinity product and launch a new product line with annual subscriptions. Probably cloud-based.
Whelp… the Affinity Suite was pretty awesome and robust. Too bad they never did a proper linux port.
Man I JUST got affinity photo for RAW work cause its a good workflow and way better than lightroom and now I find out about this? Ffs cant have shit on earth
Well on the upside you will keep your access forever and get updates for free for some time still (until v3 comes out).
If you think the workflow is good now, then it shouldn’t matter much because you will keep that workflow.
Try darktable
