We had the same conversation for over 20 years about The GIMP’s place on the Linux Desktop—almost as long as it has been the year of the Linux Desktop.
Often, on social media, infographics are shared around, providing a list of alternatives to commercial art software; those lists are extremely useful to the many artists who decided to pay $79 a month in art software subscriptions because they didn’t know Free (as in Freedom) software exists.
Yet, somehow, after uplifting artists out of their shameful ignorance, they do not immediately alter their workflow to use the Libre options. Well—they will use Blender, they will use Krita, they will get Inkscape-curious, but they will never use the GIMP under any circumstances.
Why is that?
“It’s because the GIMP uses different keyboard shortcuts”, you often hear. “You can download Jeff’s Photoshopized GIMP dotfiles to use the shortcuts you’re used to, and it changes the name of the app so it’s not that word anymore”, the persuasive argument continues.
Yet the artists never convert.
I wish to propose a conclusion to this annoying discourse that will roughly piss off every stakeholder equally, so we can finally move on.
No polite way to say a truth that hurts
The GIMP is entirely, unambiguously, 100% fit for purpose.
Sorry if that hurts to hear.
Its purpose, however, is widely misunderstood.
Its FAQ itself tells you: they are not in the business of replacing Photoshop. They are doing their own thing. The GIMP’s purpose is to create a graphics tinkerer’s toolbox that fulfills the political values of the Free Software Foundation.
It entirely succeeds at the goals it has set for itself. The toolbox has no obvious gaps, suits tinkerers, and its politics are congruent with Stallman’s beliefs.
A plumber, an electrician, any sort of contractor, will show up to the job with a truckful of power tools. In general, from expensive brands like Makita, Milwaukee, or Bosch.
Couldn’t they just do it with my LIDL cordless drill? I paid like two figures for it and i think it’s pretty good honestly.
After all, basically every single power tool is about applying rotary motion to some attachment, yeah?
I think this is a good rhetorical question to ask, because it calls for a nuanced answer: yes, a low-budget cordless drill with the proper attachment can serve as a poor substitute for half a specialist’s toolbox, and a tinkerer does not have the workload or the quality expectations to mind a low-performance tool.
Likewise, you can draw masterpieces with the most basic of tools: Susan Kare’s Japanese Lady, a two-color picture drawn to beta-test Bill Atkinson’s 1984 MacPaint, is a classic picture in computing history, that reminds us a great artist will not be limited by her simple tools. In skilled hands, the cheapest pencil available will produce art of much greater quality than anything i could ever make with the best furnished atelier.
The GIMP, or the original MacPaint, are like my amateur’s toolbox: perfectly suited to modest needs. I fix up standard issues that crop up in a very old house, and build random gizmos. I do not have the demanding needs and practiced skills to properly feel the pain when my tools struggle to machine the material, or when they lack the precision to yield clean-looking results.
Almost every issue artists raise with the GIMP follows the same contours as this idea: while they nominally have access to a well-furnished toolbox, the tools perform poorly in the hands of a skilled professional.
In return, they hear rebuttals from nerds who do not have the qualifications to know from personal experience what makes a good tool.
Do great artists require great tools? Definitely not. But once we stop discussing minimum requirements, and talk about what they wish to use, great artists sure seem to prefer the premium brands.
I have never tried educating a contractor that they could replace their 40 Volts brushless right angle drill covered in 15 years of paint splatters with the USB screwdriver i bought for €9 at discount store Action last month.
If you try, let me know how it goes for you.
Photoshop
Thomas Knoll, who created Photoshop with his brother John in 1987, sold the software to Adobe the next year: from the start, paying customers depended on it to produce graphics.
Thomas was involved in the engineering ever since, but John Knoll made his career expressing his artistry at George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic: his 40 years of film credits span multiple professions, including that of writer on a Star Wars film, not merely that of visual effects supervisor.
Blender
Ton Roosendaal, creator of Blender, started working on that 3D modeling software at NeoGeo, a Dutch animation studio: it was a no-nonsense in-house tool, meant to be used by artists from day one. Once the tool became an open-source project, the team continued to exercise it by directing short films, of which he was the producer. While those shorts are not lauded as great masterpieces of cinema, they are legitimate productions, that do not limit themselves to a demo or a test suite: their scale forces the creators to contend with the limits of their software, and improve it accordingly.
Blender started out with an abomination of a programmer UI. Cryptic interactions all over the place. To merely figure out how to resize the inspector panels would have you interrogating the manual.
When the first few minutes teaching someone how to use blender entail lecturing them why the software uses the right mouse button as its main one, you’re not off to a good start.
A confrontational attitude against would-be users would never have worked: over time, it improved, and changed its most idiosyncratic defaults.
Nowadays, nobody uses Blender simply because it’s free, they use it because it’s the best tool for the job.
Krita
In 1998, the GIMP inspired KDE folks to create their own graphics software, which evolved into Krita, its focus narrowed to digital painting: their marketing material constantly showcases work drawn with it, and their educational material always assumes that your goal is to paint stuff.
Their FAQ only has a few words to say about free software licenses, shoved near the end, rather than making it a central topic, like the GIMP does. They run their own artists’ community.
Everything they do keeps users in mind.
Note: the initial version of this article erroneously stated that Krita started as a hard fork of the GIMP.
Kai’s Power Tools
Look, we stan Kai Krause around those parts. Toyboxes of fun gimmicks first released in 1992, presented within a maximally rococo user interface, his design language was the shoulder of a gaudy giant on which Apple’s 2000s Aqua interface stood.
Were the kitschy outputs of Kai’s Power Tools useful to artists? Not really—not at the price those software boxes charged. But Kai fully understood the cultural moment in which his toys existed: a graphics nerd’s mathematical experiments, packaged properly, could appeal to personal computer hobbyists entirely uninterested in learning what a convolution matrix is.
The GIMP
By contrast, the GIMP was created by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis in 1995 while they were studying computer science at the UC Berkeley, and both of them develop the database CockroachDB as their day job. From the start, their project was explicitly political, in alignment with Richard Stallman’s politics, who personally gave them the blessing to place their program under the GNU banner.
Most contributors to the GIMP seem interested in graphics as an engineering endeavor, rather than because they have a hobby or career that requires honing the tools of their trade. The core team certainly doesn’t publish public galleries of their artwork.
It’s said that creating FOSS is about scratching your itch: the itch here is to explore the complexity of graphics engineering, much more than it is to use the resulting tool to create art.
Is it that weird? Celebrated crafters of musical instruments, like luthier Leo Fender of the guitar company that bears his name, or synthesizer designer Émilie Gillet of Mutable Instruments, famously stated that they are not musicians themselves. Despite designing the instruments, they do not make music with them. It’s not what interests them.
But the GIMP has a key difference.
If you design commercial tools you don’t use and abuse yourself, if you won’t practice dogfooding, you need another way to understand what your customers want, even a way as simple as asking them. Otherwise, the invisible hand of the market will slap some sense into you real good.
Now, if none of your customers pay you, and your external customers have entirely different desires than your internal customers?
Under those circumstances, it makes perfect sense why, for so many years, the development team would neglect usability, and adopt a highly confrontational tone against its userbase, lecturing artists that the nerds in charge know better than them.
They have mellowed out with age, but this fact remains engraved in their DNA: if no artists are stakeholders, you can’t produce a tool meant for artists.
And given that they’re not purporting very hard to be making a tool for artists, it’s unfair to resent them for not making what they have not set out to make.
The true competitors
ImageMagick represents itself with the effigy of a wizard: much arcane knowledge is required to craft command-line invocations that harness its potential.
Peep this mouthful, straight out of their docs:
magick rectangle.png -rotate 45 -geometry +30+20 -extent 128x128 \
-write rect_rot45off.png -fft -delete 1 \
-auto-level -evaluate log 100 rect_rot45off_spectrum.png
H*ck yeah. That was a dope-ass Fourier transform.
Is this a sensible way to produce cool-looking abstract patterns? Definitely not.
Is this a tool you should keep in mind for the day you need to process 200.000 pictures for some unique industrial or scientific need? Absolutely.
The GIMP, likewise, offers an expansive collection of nerdy tools and fun generative filters.
What are the artistic applications of simplex noise, cell noise, perlin noise? The question is irrelevant to the GIMP: they’re provided because they’re fun to tinker with. Their artistic potential is only an emergent side-effect. They are much like Kai’s Power Tools, the whimsical interfaces encouraging exploration replaced with spartan sliders and checkboxes.
Where Photoshop is all business, the GIMP is full of nerdy but gaudy stuff. It’s a fun hands-on introduction to many math concepts that underpin graphics processing.
Comparing the GIMP to Photoshop because of their similar user interfaces is a category error: it exists in much greater aesthetic proximity to ImageMagick or Kai’s Power Tools.
The great hole
Open-source software has an obvious Photoshop-shaped hole.
Krita partially plugs it: Krita competes against digital painting software such as Clip Studio Paint or PaintTool SAI, but digital painting is not the primary focus of Photoshop—just something it does competently enough people use it that way.
Photo manipulation, however, has no contender: once your goal is to edit photos into professional quality deliverables, there is nothing you can install on your Linux computer that will satisfy a demanding pro.
Why?
Because for 20 whole years, Linux advocates insisted that the GIMP was perfectly fit for purpose, for the purpose of serving a skilled artist rather than amusing a tinkerer. They insisted that the next version (right around the corner) would entirely fix the user interface forever. They insisted that instead of creating from scratch a challenger to Photoshop, the community should focus its efforts on contributing to the GIMP.
They’d take a single glance at the toolbox containing a handful of bargain bin LIDL tools, and lecture the veteran contractor why they are a perfect replacement for their panoply of Makita tools, since they have the same general shape.
Meanwhile, the GIMP spent years and years having discourse why a MDI was bad UI, and the WM’s job.
Do you even know what’s a MDI? HCI folks haven’t used this term in epochs! There isn’t a single 20 years old on earth who’d still use the word to describe their own UI work today. Phones happened, and changed all our assumptions about interface design.
A Multi-Document Interface, what you would call “Having tabs for each file like in a web browser”, was an object of debate for years, the GIMP folks constantly educating users why they are stupid to want that.
They were eventually forced to realize absolutely everyone expected that as the baseline standard default.
The GIMP folks are now more cordial, but 20 years ago, they thought nothing of having tutorials on drawing a straight line they used as a vehicle to mock their lusers:
I do not want to give them a rough time for something they had the good sense to remove from their site a lifetime ago. But the fact remains that 20 years later, i do remember they did that.
When the users complained that it was too difficult to figure out how to draw a straight line, their first reflex used to be condescension.
And what about the name? Is “gimp” a slur, that is, a word wielding institutional power to marginalize a minority? You need quality time researching the word’s history and etymology to decide, because it’s antiquated slang nobody uses anymore. It’s not even that clear if its use in context would be ableist, homophobic, or both.
But remains the fact it’s the kind of name wherein 4% of people shout at you it’s very offensive, 7% say “stop being so sensitive and looking for reasons to be offended”, and 89% are touching grass.
They should have changed it the second it first came up, back in the 1900’s. How can you hope to snatch corporate funding if you are perceived as needlessly controversial? Those days, they’re more willing to read the room, but reluctant to jettison decades of branding.
And here we are now.
The GIMP will never magically become software beloved by artists—not without radically changing its culture, and making the artists the ones who call the shots. The GIMP will remain what it has always set out to be: a tinkerer’s toolbox, more concerned with the purity of its software politics than with garnering a loyal userbase of photographers and designers.
But because everyone insisted to poise it as a viable Photoshop killer, Linux is left with an obvious hole in its software offering, a hole nobody managed to fill with their own challenger.
Update - 2026-09-20: cleared up a misconception i shared: Krita did not start as a hard fork of the GIMP, rather, such a fork prototype spurred its creation.
Fashioned in the ways of the Old Web, Barks is the personal blog of Aria Salvatrice, a multimedia autist from France who likes dogs and PWM sync leads.
Aria frequently disseminates edutaining samizdat about gaming, DIY synthesizers, DIY genders, computer touching, social issues, and composes pastoral industrial & baroque technopop music.
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