Mmm I know what you are saying but I used to work with a lot of 3D game artists. All but a few hated Blender and said they found it counter-intuitive. But really it was that it wasn’t just like 3DS Max and Maya (and it is a bit like Max to be honest). I’m delight over a decade later it’s use has ballooned anyway.

During the same time in games, they switch all the non-2D artists to GIMP to save money. Every time I went into the animation room for something, I could hear “GIMP can’t do X or Y” and every time I could show them how it could. They didn’t want to try and were confused/cross it wasn’t PS.

Blender used to get a lot of stick about it’s UI, but it’s now it’s doing amazingly well. It seams to be freeing 3D from Autodesk.

GIMP seams to be going through a bit of a development phase and after GTK3 move is complete, other features will get the that development. It could be interesting few years.

As for trying RISC OS, no where is especially active to be honest. Though it can be run on Raspberry Pi. The big thing it still does best is save dialogs. Just drag into a file manager window. For the decades after leaving RISC OS I have to copy paste directory paths like a primitive! The ROX Linux desktop gives you a bit of a taste of it, but only ROX apps have the dialog magic. Last I run RISC OS was ArcEmu to play Bug Hunter 1 & 2. I did some open source work on RPCEmu to run games I made as a kid. I should run it again to show the kids what I was doing at their age!

My point is intuitive isn’t the same for everyone.

GIMP doesn’t come from a clone of PS. It has it’s own history and its users are used to it as it is. Any change to be a PS clone isn’t what it’s existing users (and developers) want. Forks to do this have come and gone. Single window mode is all that came out of mainline GIMP to appeal to PS users. This is part of a thing with open source, it’s not possible to force something on the developers. You have to fork, work hard, win people over and become the new main branch. GIMP mainline keeps winning those battles.

Edit: oh and I am totally a freak in my software background outside of British computer people my age.

To you. It fit me like a glove straight away. It just made sense to me. It’s quite RISC OS like with the multiple windows thing. I used it first in about 1999 when flirting with Linux (CorelLinux) after Acorn and before Windows. Then switch about 2006 when where I was clamped down on pirate software at the workplace and bought PS for artists.

Coming from RISC OS art programs, I found GIMP’s UI perfectly intuitive. I had used PS for a few years after Acorn and before GIMP. It’s just different UI paradigms.

I hope it continues to be a non issue for you. Without you having to take any measures. Just saying it can be an issue. Search “zigbee 2.4ghz wifi interference” if you don’t believe me.

You have any 2.4 GHz WiFi problems? In theory there is a problem, and I know a dude with a lot of ZigBee and a lot of 2.4GHz problems, but without going over with work equipment and spending some time doing work for free, I can’t be sure it’s ZigBee. It’s just my best guess.

You already married to ZigBee? If not, maybe don’t. It causes 2.4Ghz interference. You’ll need to think about WiFi channels and avoid ones that overlap with ZigBee. Either that, or use 5Ghz WiFi and repeaters to make up for the lower penertration (if an issue).

Academic. The EU has already done it and so we in the UK already have it. Our market just isn’t big enough, relative to it’s locality, to do something different. Whatever the EU does just washes over us. Only now we have no say in the what that is or how it is implemented.

They should be standard protocols and you should be able to change server to competition. Be great if it was all open, but failing that, standards, competition and right to repair.

If they were more about UNIX than freedom, that could make sense back then. These days, you miss out on loads on of open stuff and are very much a third class citizen. After Linux and Windows, as the platform has neither freedom or a large user base. Macports seams to regularly have talks about how they are shunned and ignored.

That’s not fair. Multiple books of his books are award winning. Even if you only like one, the critics rate him. Other writers, rate him.

That’s the sequel to Ender’s Game. It is good, but it is Orson Scott Card.

It’s a good read, but he then back on it all and went all Apple. So it’s a bit bitter sweat. Snow Crash is probably better.

Exactly. I don’t even think it’s that different to be honest, it’s just not identical to PS and comes from a different windowing school of thought.

It needs to be faster and more stable. Crashes and slowness are killer issues. Slowness is single core issue. You can see one core working it’s ass off, but the other like 15, sitting doing nothing. Plus it freezes during that often because it’s not async/multi-threaded enough. Crashes, well that’s just bad, but in this case it’s normally when even 48GB RAM isn’t enough. Bloody curved geometry from external sources with massive messes. Needs more exchanging files methods that isn’t mesh based. But also mesh rationalization tools are need too.

Meh, always done what I need and I find easy enough.

I’ve been in rooms for people forced to switch from PS to GIMP for corporate cost cutting. Every time I went to help someone on something else (animation or exporter related), I’d hear “GIMP can’t do X” and “GIMP can’t do Y”. I’d go over and show it could and how. It was never even stuff that hard. Layer stuff often. GIMP gets a lot of hate I just don’t think is justified.

It’ll catch on at some point. KiCAD did. Blender did. Many other FOSS apps have!

Gimp is intuitive to me. I grew up on RISC OS, not Windows, and only later learned Photoshop. Switching was easy for me, and that was before I got into FOSS. It was just free and legal.

I’ve seen lots of people from a Windows only background struggle with it. I agree it’s not like a normal Windows app. Maybe single window mode helps, but I’m not in a place to judge.

I can only speak of on Linux. If you know the disk is bad, clone it, with ddrescue, and fix the clone. But in future RAID and backup remotely. Also, next gen filesystems like ZFS and Btrfs for check sums and self healing and subvolumes with send/receive deltas between them.