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"Linux Desktop: A Collective Delusion" - an unhinged rant
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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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If you want more people to use your app, then more people have to be using your app. Simple as.
Well yeah, we are talking about what causes adoption. You have to incentivize people. Maybe it’s cost. Maybe it’s feature sets. Maybe it’s being FOSS. The point is people don’t change their professional software lightly. Production houses even less so.
The problem with this is that GIMP doesn't aim, or have the funding to be more than just a Photoshop clone, so at best it will be as good as PS but for free. That won't help you convince people already making money from their work using PS, but maybe given enough time and some advertisement people who are new to image manipulation will start learning how to use GIMP instead of Photoshop.
GIMP's problem - and most FOSS media production tools face this issue - is that it is always years behind Adobe's offerings. The gap is very wide the moment you go from hobbyist to even part-time professional. Day to day users who just need to cut a video around or touch up a photo are generally going to be happy.
Make no mistake, I do not like Adobe as a company. I only use Premiere and Photoshop/Lightroom because my company pays for it. But the fact is Adobe is years ahead. GIMP will never have the AI-integration/automatic tools that Adobe has been building out either. Go use Adobe's audio enhance tool or auto-transcription and be amazed. Truly. They are remarkable tools I only dreamed of even 5 years ago. Your Hindenburgs and GIMPs of the world are just not going to match that any time soon. These developers do not have that kind of capacity.
I had another section about GIMP having to play catch up with Photoshop for eternity because of low funding (compared to PS), but I deleted it. And yeah this is another thing: GIMP will always be behind if it doesn't have professional users who are willing to donate, and professional users will not use GIMP unless it stops lagging behind. additionally even professional users of GIMP may not donate, because they are not forced to. So even if GIMP gains a lot of users, it may still be underfunded.
Absolutely. GIMP needs to reshape itself more in to Reaper's image. Reaper has slowly expanded its reach among freelancers in particular as a powerful DAW because of their "pay when you're committed" model. They're actually a (albeit minor) competitor to Adobe Audition. I feel comfortable recommending it to professionals.
That's kind of hard to do when your software is open source and distributed on every Linux distro's repos. Someone will fork it as soon as this happens and at the same time FOSS enthusiasts will not be happy with it, and GIMP will lose most (if not all) of it's donations.
That’s a good point. I wish they could do what reaper does, because I think it’s a fantastic model. But it would be a bad luck in the FOSS world, which is basically why they exist in the first place. Fair but unfortunate point lol