this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
215 points (94.6% liked)

Technology

59287 readers
6348 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Shoutouts

Thanks to the following commenters below for additional recommendations that I added to this post!

  • bruhduh
  • Toes

Free Open Source Alternatives

[Visual/Graphical]

For all visual/graphical artists I would personally recommend switching from Photoshop over to


[Audio]

For audio migration I'd recommend switching from Soundbooth to


[PDF]

Acrobat Reader to


[Video]

Premiere to


There's also an excellent thread started by [email protected]

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

Krita can't do the same things Gimp can though + I already know where all the buttons are from years of using it. I fail to understand why people hate gimp so much. I've never run into an image editing task that I couldn't do in gimp.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago

Because, like they said, the UI is unintuitive

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The UI and shortcut keys are unintuitive. Simple tasks that would take me seconds in Photoshop take me 5 minutes in gimp. I'll never understand that there is always one person replying like you are here.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

My advice: Don't do hotkeys. Just use the toolbars for literally everything. Can't find the paths window? Check under the Windows dropdown. Real simple. Don't like the organization? Click and drag the boxes to reorganize, stack em where you want.

I think for several versions it's come as Single Window mode by default which is nice, imo.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So here's the thing. Just about anyone in a creative field learned Photoshop inside and out. We learned the shortcut keys and relied on them to be much much faster at our jobs. So not using them feels like a huge handicap and having to relearn them would be bad enough, but there are common things in gimp that I found have no shortcut keys at all. And the ones that do exist largely don't make sense, even when ignoring the Photoshop conventions. When I'm struggling to zoom without clicking several times, the app is the issue, not me.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm sorry all of you put your eggs into one basket which enshitified into an interface for babies. BTW, I'm an artist both digital and traditional. When I got my degree in science I was able to get arts degrees at the same time fulfilling electives requirements. My favorite programs are Clip Studio Paint, Gimp, Blender, and Autodesk Fusion 360, but I don't use hotkeys for any of them, except occasionally rigging in blender, or I would be memorizing like 300+ different hotkeys.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Draw a circle in gimp is sort of uninuitive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I fail to understand why people hate gimp so much.

Because they've spent years learning Photoshop's unintuitive interface rather than GIMP's unintuitive interface. I learned them both more or less in parallel and found them both equally awful. (So who does have an intuitive interface? Paint Shop Pro, back in the days that JASC owned it, came the closest of any piece of raster image editing software I've ever used.)

In all fairness, there are a few features that Photoshop has and GIMP doesn't, but the ones I'm aware of are professional level stuff (spot colour support and some complex editing constructs), and there's usually a way to do without them or compensate with some other program.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I’m feeling this so much right now. Trying to learn FreeCAD. The interface is so unintuitive. I’m no stranger to CAD.

The program is so irregular, inconsistent… Things that should work give unintelligible errors.

Sure, it’s pre-release 0.22, but so frustrating. Their support forums are unhelpful/unfriendly at StckOverflow levels, just without the nice interface.

Save me the “but it’s free, you should contribute to it if you don’t like it. I know it’s free. I’ve donated. I’m looking for an Open solution, not another hobby.