<story><title>GIMP 2.99.18: The last development preview before 3.0</title><url>https://www.gimp.org/news/2024/02/21/gimp-2-99-18-released/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vallode</author><text>Another comment mentioned GIMP may have assumptions of bad UX within their codebase which makes me think about long-lived and large scale projects like this in general. The technical debt of GIMP has been slowly amassing (like all projects) since 1995 (wow!) and I assume that as every year goes by it gets increasingly difficult to do a large scale re-write of any part of the logic.&lt;p&gt;Tools like Photopea[1] come along and throw a fresh perspective at things all the time, these tools never have the breadth and depth of feature support that GIMP has but basically always manage to &amp;quot;one-up&amp;quot; it over something.&lt;p&gt;How long will it take before GIMP has usability on-par with Photoshop? How long until it attains the aesthetic coherence necessary to win people over visually? I love GIMP, but is the battle against 20 years of technical debt even winnable?&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.photopea.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.photopea.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bemusedthrow75</author><text>Another really long-lived package, FreeCAD (it&amp;#x27;s about six years younger), has tremendous parallels:&lt;p&gt;- bad (in places better called solipsistic) UX&lt;p&gt;- underlying architectural issues from its dependencies (e.g. OpenCascade&amp;#x27;s OCCT and Coin3D)&lt;p&gt;- a flood of competing workbenches and plugins so users struggle with initial workflow, many abandoned or undermaintained&lt;p&gt;- something of a reliance on knowledge of Python scripting to solve advanced issues&lt;p&gt;- and (akin to GIMP avoiding non-destructive-editing for two decades) a fundamental architectural issue: topological naming problems that other CAD packages have solved&lt;p&gt;But things in FreeCAD land are changing &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; fast -- there&amp;#x27;s a TNP implementation coming quite soon to core FreeCAD, there&amp;#x27;s a core assembly workbench, a materials system and really significant GUI and UX improvements.&lt;p&gt;The reason is things are changing is that that people central to FreeCAD looked across the open source landscape to Blender, and saw how a project can be run, and how commercial companies could consult on top of it.&lt;p&gt;Everything has changed within a matter of three years. Despite its issues, FreeCAD is now exciting to watch.&lt;p&gt;Whereas GIMP seems to still be circling around looking for the best solutions to things they never finish. Krita has become the thing GIMP could have been, and it is nine years younger.</text></comment>
<story><title>GIMP 2.99.18: The last development preview before 3.0</title><url>https://www.gimp.org/news/2024/02/21/gimp-2-99-18-released/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vallode</author><text>Another comment mentioned GIMP may have assumptions of bad UX within their codebase which makes me think about long-lived and large scale projects like this in general. The technical debt of GIMP has been slowly amassing (like all projects) since 1995 (wow!) and I assume that as every year goes by it gets increasingly difficult to do a large scale re-write of any part of the logic.&lt;p&gt;Tools like Photopea[1] come along and throw a fresh perspective at things all the time, these tools never have the breadth and depth of feature support that GIMP has but basically always manage to &amp;quot;one-up&amp;quot; it over something.&lt;p&gt;How long will it take before GIMP has usability on-par with Photoshop? How long until it attains the aesthetic coherence necessary to win people over visually? I love GIMP, but is the battle against 20 years of technical debt even winnable?&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.photopea.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.photopea.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Pingk</author><text>The problems with GIMP are the same as Musescore before it was bought out - Having dedicated designers&amp;#x2F;programmers allows more sweeping and coherent changes to be made.&lt;p&gt;Voluntary fixes are necessarily smaller in scope and suboptimal as a result, leading to more complexity when those systems need to be changed later.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also reminded of Casey Muratori&amp;#x27;s talk about software architecture being a reflection of the organisation that made it. Open source projects are at the extreme end where contributors and org charts are highly fluid, and communication between contributors is low-bandwidth, accelerating the complexity increase.</text></comment>