Source:Jehan
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/10373It looks like Gimp 3 isn't going to be released until April/May 2024 and when it releases there is no good reason to believe it will increase Gimp's audience and spark revival in a Gimp community like Mike Davies said once. Though it may slightly speed up Gimp development as GTK is a stable framework. I wouldn't expect the world as more and more people are moving to AI tools on smart phones and websites that auto remove backgrounds, inpaint anything, harmonize photos, deblur, denoise, and change sky textures, as indicated by alexa website rankings and youtube video views on those topics vs Gimp. Even my own text styling plugins can be replaced by things like "flaming text". And if they ever need a way to move and manipulate images technically they can just use PhotoPea in browser. Today everything is done only in a browser without installing anything; people view installing software as a downside and it looks to me like Gimp's main audience are people who prefer doing things the "old school" way and privacy advocates who don't like SaaS or anti intellectual property people via political reasons. The vast majority of people do not fall in those categories and will just use whatever works. Lastly the reason I'm most upset and venting. My layer effects engine likely won't make the cut in Gimp 3 as they freeze it Dec 2023. So yeah that's the real reason I'm upset venting at Gimp.
What do you guys think about Gimp 3's planned date for release? Hopefully its more positive then my views which are highly negative. Better late then never, or is it too late for Gimp to stand a chance against commercial software? I hold the latter opinion.
As I've been bragging on the forum here, discord and twitter that I have likely spent over a thousand hours studying GEGL and I've made 70 GEGL plugins for Gimp in 1 1/2 years (may 2022 till now making plugins) and (june 2021-now studying GEGL) and I am already convinced; maybe out of arrogance, that
no one will ever beat me at developing GEGL plugins relating to text styling ever, even if Gimp's team simplifies the process in the future I remain skeptical due to the countless hours of work I put in solving difficult problems such as 1. beveling an outline separately from the text, 2. making blend mode switchers for bevels and inner glows, 3. making an inner glow plugin by inverted transparency on a drop shadow 4.Giving drop shadow a random seed.... I can go on and on about technical things I found out about GEGL. I predict in the future; 2-5 years from now, others will make GEGL based layer effects engine plugins for Gimp using dropshadow and bevels but remain skeptical that it will even come close to what I did; unless they study and use my code. Which of course they are welcome to do. I point out that only BareFootLiam and SoulessT) have co-participated in making GEGL plugins with me. Liam helped me learn a lot of things and SoulessT made two GEGL plugins back in May-June 2023 and confirmed he was not going to make any more as he said he had an interest in painting with Gimp more then plugin dev. This in my opinion shows that there is no deeply vested interest in Gimp's progress. To defend my borderline rude claim let me give an example and explain how FOSS development can be compared to gaming communities.
It is well know that gaming communities exist around niche unpopular video games released in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. These retro games have fan bases and modders of people who study and modify closed source games; via reverse engineering software and push the game to its limit via "speed running" which is beating the game as quickly as possible. I mentioned retro gaming communities because they do to legacy video games what I do to GEGL. Thousands of hours of work studying the game/GEGL Push the limit of the game/GEGL's meta and look for technical ways to perfect things in the game/GEGL. This behavior found in gaming communities does not exist at all in FOSS development. FOSS's main attitude seem to be just contribute to open source code so they can put stuff on their resume to impress a big tech company and get a six figure big tech job. All about the money, not the joy of FOSS. My goal is to bright that attitude to FOSS development.
Sorry if this post came off as rude. Its just frustrating knowing a ton of technical things about GEGL that I cannot share with anyone as they won't understand what I am talking about. You guys know all about the script fu and python stuff but if we had a conversation about the technicalities of GEGL nodes and composers you wouldn't understand what I am talking about. Now let me end this long semi controversial post by saying I love Gimp but I feel like it failed as a project. If people in STEM cared Gimp would be where it was today ten years ago. We'd have GTK3, non-destructive editing, and GEGL layer effects in 2012-2015 instead of 2022-2025. So just imagine an alternative time line where Gimp kept up with competition.