this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
494 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
83990 readers
3565 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you think Canva won't pull the same shit Adobe does once they have the market dominance to do so, you're deluding yourself.
The only future-proof, user-respecting, dignified alternative is FOSS.
Canva surely would become assholes if they had a monopoly, but it’s a loooooong way from “gaining some market traction” to “Adobe is defeated and powerless to compete”
If only gimp wasn't garbage.. Tbh I'm also kinda wondering how Affinity did pull off the move they made with their 3 programs turning into one, at the same time redoing so much of it.am And why foss can't do it.
Of course there's money and closed source is probably messier in a lot of places than foss is (or at least targets to be), but is that it?
Unironic question: is it possible to explain to a non-artistic, non-graphic-design techie like me what makes GIMP so inadequate? I hear this refrain a lot but have never heard an explanation for why it falls SO short that it's not a viable alternative for most people.
A few years ago I tried putting text on a path (think "curvy text"). First tried gimp, quit frustrated after about a hour. While at some point I "kind of" got it to work, it looked like shit. Then I opened photoshop, was done in about three minutes. Note that I never did it before in photoshop nor gimp.
Luckily, nowadays I just open photopea whenever I would have used photoshop in the past. The fact that one single guy built a better photo editor than gimp should tell you everything.
It's been a long time since I last used it so I don't remember specifics, but I found really basic stuff that would take a couple of seconds to do in photoshop were a lot more difficult in gimp. Krita is better...
Was it more difficult or just unfamiliar? Like, if you'd given it a couple of weeks maybe it would have become intuitive? Or was it just bad UX?
I use gimp at least weekly. The UX isn't great imo, but I'm used to it now, and I'm sure Photoshop would boggle my mind. It also has improved quite a bit in the past years.
I know its not realistic, but I just imagine how great GIMP would be if people donated just 1/20th of what they pay Adobe to the GIMP devs.
Same with LibreOffice vs Office.
We are really missing out on some potentially fantastic software so that a few people can be in the centibillionaire club and it makes me sangry
I know that's true about more than just software, but the way to "fight back" here is so easy and low risk compared to fighting the other cartels that farm us for $$. It is as easy as not using their products and services if there is a viable alternative that respects your humanity.
it's difficult to tell if it's bad ux or unfamiliarity when you're good at using one and not the other, and not really worth the effort when switching to krita was easier.