• 3 Posts
  • 269 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle





  • millie@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.orgThe problem with GIMP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    18 days ago

    You have literally no idea who I am or what I do.

    I used GIMP to make a mock-up of a sign for a restaurant just yesterday. Is it going to be the tool I use for the final product? No, because that’ll be in vector, but it’s a lot easier to slap something together in than Inkscape or Krita.

    ‘Killer apps’ are meaningless in comparison to useful apps. I’m an artist who needs usable tools for her work. GIMP qualifies. Personally, I find it way easier and more intuitive to navigate than Krita, Inkscape, or any of Adobe’s suite. It may not be for you, that’s cool.

    But what isn’t cool is to pretend you know about other people’s lives and what they need. Speak for yourself, you are perfectly capable of doing that. If you don’t like GIMP’s UI, that’s great. If you think GIMP’s UI is absolutely horrible for every user and nobody would ever use it for professional work… you’re literally just completely wrong.











  • So, just to make this clear.

    The original goalpost was: “The US is exactly the same as Russia.” This being in the context of an article talking about Russian librarians being imprisoned and active extreme suppression of the free exchange of ideas being organized by the Russian government.

    There are certainly issues going on with libraries. John Oliver recently did an episode going over a lot of it. But the difference there is that these are largely organized by either fringe politicians or politicians in heavily right-wing states. I don’t really see evidence of it at a Federal level, which is what would be the equivalent to what’s going on in Russia. Even where some of this stuff is happening, it doesn’t seem to yet be as extreme as the situation there.

    Is it a similar and worrying pattern? Yes. Is it ‘exactly the same thing’? Definitely not.

    The US is extremely different from state to state, which can make getting anything done on a wide scale really chaotic, but it also means that we get to try new things and strike out on our own as a state if there’s popular support. That’s how we got marriage equality for queer folks, it’s how we legalized marijuana in a lot of states, and it’s what makes us able to do things like pass laws that protect people from other states’ repressive laws. We can do things like provide a safe haven for people seeking abortions who live in states where it’s illegal. There are states in the US that will literally take in trans folks as refugees from states with repressive laws. On the other hand, we have Florida, where there’s actually a no travel advisory for trans people because they’ll arrest us for trying to use a bathroom or having our gender on our driver’s license.

    And like, all this stuff you’re saying is absolutely true. It is a huge mess of near unchecked capitalistic greed in a lot of cases.

    But at this point we’ve moved the goal posts. Because they now seem to be “the US also has serious humanitarian problems”. Which, that’s true. But it doesn’t mean the same thing as “the US is exactly the same as Russia.”

    We have our own set of problems.


  • millie@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.orgThe problem with GIMP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    25 days ago

    Cool condescension, but I’ve been using Photoshop on and off since 2005, have occasionally used Illustrator, and used to spend an absurd amount of time with Flash. In addition to GIMP, I currently have Krita and Inkscape installed.

    I literally prefer GIMP’s UI. It doesn’t have extra shit, it doesn’t try to force me into a single window, and it goes really, really well with a multi-monitor setup. I don’t care that it doesn’t automatically edit non-destructively, because my workflow is adapted to it. Layers and folders are plenty.

    No one piece of software is going to be the ideal solution for everyone. That’s capitalistic exceptionalism infecting the rational analysis of what tool suits which user best. Photoshop may suit you better, but I’d take the sleek usefulness of GIMP over the bloat that accompanies all that extra stuff I don’t need any day.

    Why do I need an AI strapped to my tool for pixel art, pathing, and masking?