I really want an mp3 player right now - my last one broke and I don't want to carry a phone instead. But it seems like they're either ultra-cheap, overpriced or don't have features I need (like Bluetooth). It is so sad that the midrange audio players pretty much disappeared now. So instead looking as DIY projects, cannot believe.
The original ipod looks very cool btw, even if I would never use one myself - way too large.
Why necessarily "used"? Also I have this exact thing already. I just wanted a device that has no cell connectivity option and thus no tracking, and also (maybe even more importantly) - is smaller and lighter. Going for sports with a phone is inconvenient af.
I am using a Hifi Walker H2. It is a reasonable price, has bluetooth and no capacitive touch inputs. The UI is not great but the device is physically solid and works for me.
I pre-ordered a Tangara on their crowd funding. I am hopeful about the opensource hardware and software. Only reservation is capacitive touch scroll wheel.
They don’t call them “mp3 players” anymore - that may be why you can’t find what you need. Look for a “DAP” instead - digital audio player - and you’ll probably have more luck.
For example, the Fiio M7 is $200 and is pretty full-featured. I have the M6 and I think I paid around $100, but I don’t think it’s being sold anymore.
What I looked for were product categories. Ye, seen these models. $200 is very, very expensive for me, it would be weird to spend on a player more than you would on a phone.
I still use my iPod Classic. I can plug it into my car for when I'm out of FM range, and I have a Bluetooth adapter for it that plugs into the headphone socket & lets me listen via my hearing aids. It's better than a phone for me, because the mobile signal is weak where I live, and most of my garden is out of WiFi range. It fits all my music and still has room for podcasts.
easy enough to resolve, since the G stands for GNU just pronounce it the same as that, and since GNU stands for GNU'S not UNIX, it pronounces G the same as GNU, which pronounces G the same as GNU, which pronounces G the same as GNU, which pronounces G the same as GNU, which pronounces G the same as GNU
Yeah, the destructive editing and lack of a content aware fill is made me stop using it and go back to Photoshop. Krita also seems more usable these days in the FOSS world. The name is a lot easier to fix than those missing features, though.
the UI for GIMP is so horrifically bad that I basically refuse to use it. Not like, on principal or anything, if it improves i'd be happy to give it a shot, but because every experience I've had with it has been pretty immediately negative, and finding solutions to problems I have seems more effort than its worth. I want gimp to be good, it's a mature piece of software with a lot going for it, but it also feels like its design is kind of up its own ass, in a sense? It's weird.
It's funny that one thing I really liked about it was the floating windows and toolbar. Then everyone complained and they brought it all together. But now people I work with using software that we pay nearly a million dollars to license are getting all excited becuase they introduced.... floating windows.
The thing is, floating windows were absolutely useless in the age of 13 - 17" CRTs. On modern ultrawide or even just conventional widescreen displays, they make far more sense.
Normally I wouldn’t take comments like this to heart. But I tried the latest beta recently after maybe 15y and wow. You’re totally bang on. I was stunned how bad the UI was. How bad the app was. Upon reading this, it all just sort of makes sense.
I’m sad things are so bad on the Linux front that this is the most highly rated design tool. Linux community deserves better.
The sad thing is like, it's an INCREDIBLY mature piece of software. It's well regarded for a reason. But if a piece of software requires that I fight with it to get it to behave how I want, that maturity has zero value at all. It kind of feels like a microcosm of Linux itself like 10-15 years ago, when I was tinkering with it in middle and high school. It's functional, but it asks you as a user to change how you think about using something like it in the first place while also forcing you to make concessions that seldom seem worthwhile.
And if Linux at large can get there, with things like proton and flatpak and Wayland and mature desktop environments and whatever else, gimp can too. But it seems like it's got a contributor base of people that like it's weird eccentricities, and take the UX development companies like Adobe and affinity (now canva) have invested and just shirked it on principal. And like, I get having an aversion to those sorts of companies/projects/developments, there's a lot of dark patterns there that are concerning. But I also feel like the kind of Linux user that defends and possibly enjoys GIMP in its current state is content fighting with their machine and the software on it, and forgets that there's value in taking joy in interacting with your computer. Good UI and good UX are implicitly valuable (not to mention the accessibility benefits, but that's a whole different conversation), and I feel the FOSS space forgets all of that completely. It's a shame.
Yeah spot on. It’s pushing 30. And what’s even more wild is that a road to good UX has already been mapped out. By Sketch. By Figma. By Photoshop. By Pixelmator. By Infinity Design. The list is endless. I haven’t seen anything stay so bad. In fact when I used it some 15y ago, I felt it to have been better than it currently is. The UI was at least close to Ps, which is actually quite intuitive (or used to be around 2019).
UX is gold. I used Sketch for work (we have Macs at the studio) and then were forced to switch to Figma. Since Figma is electron, it can’t hook into the OS like Sketch can. That meant the loss of edge snapping, specifically the handles on the vector lines. I felt that tiny itty bitty little loss in my bones. It made using Figma as a whole belaboured in comparison to Sletch (which I feel is near the pinnacle of UX).
Adobe Ai is also a good example of bad UX. That app is so backwards in the way it works and so eclectic in its feature deployment that you can’t just jump into it like you can say Ps. It feels like say Blender without any 3D knowledge.
There's always been a real stick in the mud attitude with GIMP. No matter how many people cry out about it's confusing UX it's always tried to serve the existing userbase rather than design to expand its usefulness to more people. I think this is a shame and is why GIMP never achieved what Blender has.
I remember trying to use it the best part of 20 years ago when I wanted to make animated gifs. It was so hard to use it was easier to pirate photoshop/imageready. Then a year or so back I tried to use it as I had moved to being a Linux user and was kind of astonished that the UX was still so bloody hostile.
I don't think I'm a moron (though how many morons do... so take this with a pinch of salt) but trying to figure out how to do basic things like cut and paste, cropping etc. without reading documentation just goes hellishly wrong. Any time I take the time to follow a guide on how to use it I'm taken aback by how unintuitive it is and once I'm done I forget it's idiosyncrasies immediately.
I remember "gimpshop" being a thing at one point, which I never got to use but heard it used the processing of GIMP with a more photoshop like UX. Though I believe that project lapsed.
Anyway, yeah it'd be nice in a world where things like GNOME have become such beautiful UXes that projects like GIMP have the courage to revolutionise themselves.
Having spent ages trying to adopt it and failing like 20+ years ago it's just crazy to me that every time I give it another chance, it still doesn't have non destructive editing and is still a non-intuitive UI from hell. It feels like they want it to be like this.
You might have missed the news, Affinity sold out to Canva. Really sucks, Affinity was the only truly good alternative but I put it in the mental "never touch" category immediately when that happened.
Surely anyone who feels that it’s an urgent problem can make a fork which is fully identical in every way except for the logo and name and branding
Since the amount of effort that would be required for that would be infinitesimal compared to what was already done to make the software
And then produce all these good things which you say are being held back
Or, wait, did you mean you wanted someone else to do that because you feel that it’s super important enough to insist that someone else should do it but not important enough to do yourself?
As I recall someone made the same lame argument about the name being divisive, a fork was created called Glimpse and it fell on its face not long after it was formed.
Things like this are a waste of energy, nobody cares that it's called gimp.
Yeah, I mean glimpse seems fine; in general it seems completely fine if someone says "hey I think this is a problem for some percent of people who have weird priorities in life because they are corporate or weird thinking, I support the idea to solve it and make a friendly name for them"
It's just that if the response is "yeah that percent of people are not our problem, we just want to make this project and we did, thank you and good day", then you need to be able to say "ok I will make the fork to fix it then" instead of writing up a big blog post demanding that they need to obey you on what your opinion of the priorities for their own project should be.
I mean, just because you don't care doesn't mean nobody does.
If I was running a school where students with physical challenges attended, I would not feel comfortable asking them to use software called Gimp, so I would just avoid it.
That said, I would avoid it anyways in favor of Krita, I'm just saying.
Plenty of words have multiple meanings, but I rarely think of them when I'm using a word to mean a specific thing. I know the meanings of gimp, but I never think of them when using GIMP; perhaps because it's capitalized and I always assumed it stood for something (and it does).
But anyway, and more importantly than that, what you describe is a problem that you might run into with any word.
A small subset of the world population can view it as an insult, but for the vast majority it means nothing. Sort of like the word "negro" in Spanish, which some English people take offense to when they hear it. I even searched "gimp" in 3 different search engines, and the first 2 to 5 results were always the GIMP. Most people have no other concept for the word.
Let me put it this way: you say you'd favor Kira, but how do you know that there aren't some kids in Egypt, or Russia, or someone else in the world, that take offense to the word "Kira"?
This really isn't the article it wishes it were :-\ It kinda reeks of "I've picked a thing I want to argue and now I'm going to make up an argument for it" down to admitting that good sources aren't available (which makes me wonder whether there are no good sources at all or just no good sources that support the author's argument).
Bonus unpoints for the BDSM reference, just because I hate seeing that term held up as a negative or scary kind of thing and I feel like and/or choose to believe that's the point in such an unprofessional article, rather than simply meaning "Look, it means sex stuff and that's unprofessional." So there. Nyeh! 😝
Also, I don't think I've ever heard anyone who actually used or contributed to the GIMP (or intended to) complain about the name. I'm interested in seeing some actual data on that, if there is any. Personally I wouldn't particularly mind a name change but I can't say whether it'd get more attention and interest than it'd lose to irritating people accustomed to the current one.
Literally the only times I've heard anybody say anything about it was basically when they first learn about it and giggle for a few minutes, then get on with their lives.
I think the only way the name could be any sort of issue was if they were explicitly trying to be "family friendly," which would imply that it's intended for either christian mothers or advertisers (we all know how the children feel about sex jokes), which, since this is Lemmy and we're talking about FOSS software, I'm sure I don't have to explain why that's a stupid idea.
To add to this, I've been using GIMP on and off for a decade and I've never given any thought to the name. It's all capitalized. I didn't think it was a backronym, I thought it was just an acronym.
I've used this in professional settings (I used to work in academic molecular bio), and I was very evangelical about it. Especially because we're not doing high-level artistic work, we just sometimes need something for processing microscope images or making graphics for scientific publications.
I'd say to any and everyone, "You know, you don't have to pay an annual subscription fee for Photoshop: there's this free, open-source program called GIMP that does most of what you need and you don't have to pay a thing! Want me to install it for you?"
I didn't even think to be embarrassed about the name, and no one ever seemed to care in conversation. As others have said, the bigger impediments are people's attachment to commercial software and interface challenges. This is just an absolutely silly complaint to make.
the author of the article wrote an article a while ago about how they think steam is enshittifying and becoming bad because they got rid of mac support and some people didn't like steam in the 2000s, so I think this person just takes controversial opinions randomly and writes about them.
As far as the article goes, the word gimp isn't necessarily seen as problematic because of its sexual reference but rather as a derogatory term for disabled people. And just because many people agree that they don't care, doesn't mean we shouldn't care. Democratic decisions fall flat when they deal with issues of minorities. The large majority of people doesn't care about disabled people. So basing ethical considerations on the majority's opinion is really no good idea. Same goes for other discriminatory language and slurs where always the same arguments are presented. I think the article does a great job of portraying the gatekeeping biases of such discussions.
Idunno where you got the idea that I'm for slurs or against disabled people but it's kinda insulting, especially when you took "sometimes said as a derogatory word" and ran it like it's the whole point or the article over the complaint that got its own paragraph (the Pulp Fiction bit) and shared the same sentence the disability bit is in, or the one that got the whole rest of the article (that it's vaguely unprofessional). In fact I'm getting more irked every time I go look for evidence that I've misinterpreted it. Reading through a couple crap anecdotes to one that actually says something, we get a VP smirking at the name, which makes me wonder whether that person's just a hateful prick smirking at a disability term or one of the many who giggle at any reference to anything associated with sex. The other three are just "some people dislike the name." I conclude that the article does not take issue primarily with the name being an abusive term and wonder why you'd say that.
I muchly dislike careless use of abusive terms (I've probably got an essay or two ranting over the usage (and existence) of "crazy" and "insane," for example) so I really don't disagree that abusive terms should be treated much more seriously.
My entire point was that the author seems to be throwing things at the wall hoping something sticks, not seriously worrying some spooky scary BDSM critter (hi, it's me :3 ) is gonna tie them up (of course not, the ropes are for me :3 ), nor that anyone's getting bullied by the tool's name or it's irritating old wounds or really anything at all. I don't think they're taking any of this seriously. If the term's abusive in a way that can't be neutralized by taking it from abusers and making it something else (an arguably valid thing to do) then that's worth actual serious discussion and not just part of one sentence in a six-page essay.
tl;dr: The article barely even mentions anything about disability and, I think, does so more as an excuse for itself than out of any serious concern for anyone. My complaint/point is, to be clear, exclusively that the article is crap and not that abusive terminology is okay. The article has failed to demonstrate any actual problem with the name itself other than handwavey "some people say" that it's vaguely unprofessional.
The problem is considerably smaller if you consider that the software is used by a lot more people than English speakers (both L1 and L2+). For these, "gimp" is not some sex stuff, but rather that critter chewing on a brush. And even for L2+, the word "gimp" is often missing from our vocabs.
As others said in this thread, the actual problem holding GIMP back is called user interface. It has improved, but it's still awful.
I am not a native speaker and I never associated gimp with a sex meaning, even if my vocabulary is pretty expanded.
It could be called "DesirePix 2.0" or "SeductionStudio 4.0" but the main problem is that it gives a worse user experience than using Adobe Photoshop 5.0 on windows 95, on every single aspect. Features, speed, UI, ease of use, and so on
Disclaimer: it's not that I'm denigrating the devs, making a program like gimp is super fucking hard and as a lousy programmer I could never be able to make it better. Ideally, it would need some talented designers to develop a more usable UI.
I see comparisons to photopea, but that's a UI clone of Photoshop and that is not really wanted. It also didn't come with technical debt from the 90s
It seems like the consensus of this thread is that the name isn't holding it back. That was my thinking going into it, but the article makes some very valid points such as the name (being related to a sexual and sometimes derogatory word) making it a non-starter in some organizations.
I have it installed on all our computers at work for basic image editing, but we're a small business and never gave it much thought. I can absolutely see it being problematic in a school setting, however. More to the point, Adobe has ably demonstrated: get them hooked on your software in school and you'll dominate the market. Imagine if kids had been learning GIMP instead of Photoshop all these years.
Anyway, I've got no dog in this fight. Just pointing out what I see as a valid point in the article.
Also, I like their original name possibility of IMP much better. The mascot could have been a cute little imp instead of ... whatever it is now.
My very large organisation has Gimp available for basic image manipulation. I've tried to get them to use Paint.NET instead, but nooooo... Apparently we like hitting nails with jackhammers around here
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