Saturday, November 21, 2009

Ubuntu withdraws Gimp-y love

An article over on Lockergnome clued me in to the news that Ubuntu is considering not installing Gimp by default. While Gnomie Matt Hartley is expressing his disagreement here, I'm not surprised.

I have to disagree. What people want - even among Linux users - is the equivalent of Paint. Gimp is not Paint.

Gimp is not hard either. Especially if all you want to do is crop an image. But then you could use Phatch (which is also not so simple, but still).

Why is Gimp not Paint? Because it is (rightfully so) closer to Photoshop. At the heart of the problem are basic premises. Things like drawing a simple square. It is simply counter-intuitive to select a blank region and then choose "stroke selection".

I love Gimp and will happily install it from repo in future versions of Ubuntu because, like K3b and BlueFish, it's on my "pull" list when I build a new machine.

But it doesn't surprise me A BIT that Ubuntu is opting not to install it by default.

No comments: