Folks; reading all along this discussion the last couple of days, I see things becoming funny in some ways. Comparing apples and pears, anyone?
Am Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:21:21 +0300 schrieb Jarno Suni <[email protected]>: > > Can GNU Paint crop images? I am not that sure... > > Did you mean gpaint? Natty suggests only xpaint when you type gpaint > in terminal (if gpaint is not installed). Gpaint can add text, but I > did not find undo function. > > Does anybody miss layers? Yes. I _do_. I have been working with Gimp ever since 0.9.something, and at the very least, for what I do, layers is an absolutely essential feature. But this is irrelevant IMHO. Shouldn't the question be, considering limited amount of space on a live or installation medium, which application that comes bundled with the default package provides _most_ value to _most_ users? At the moment, I see a discussion which ends up merrily mixing various different kinds of applications, including 1) advanced image retouching / photo processing applications like Gimp or pinta 2) image management and browsing applications that provide for more or less extensive simple editing features, such as gthumb, geeqie, fotoxx, f-spot, shotwell and the like, 3) bare-bone image viewers, such as ristretto, gpicview, eog, ... 4) batch image processing applications such as phatch, imagemagick+scripting, ... . 5) applications not limited to yet focussed on doing pixel based painting, such as gpaint, mtpaint, ... . Maybe except for (1), I am completely convinced for each of these categories there are 1000+ more applications that easily could be listed here. So, what provides benefit to an end user using a Live medium or an easy-on installer without thinking twice? - Apps in category (1): Maybe not. Gimp still seems considered user-unfriendly by quite some people (whyever), and overally, the complexity and feature set of such applications IMHO is something just needed by advanced users. - Apps in category (2): Definitely yes. Pretty much everyone owns a digital camera or at least a camera equipped cell phone of some sort these days it seems, and the use case of sorting a whole load of images, browsing them, eventually scaling down one or two to quickly allow for sending them via e-mail or uploading them to flickr, facebook, ... seems the use case most likely. Should this ask for an application that comes with "sharing" support - "upload to flickr"? - Apps in category (3): Well, not sure, maybe not. Only benefit these apps provide compared to these in category (2) _might_ be a lower memory footprint, at the expense of eventually having to work with two different applications for "viewing" and "rudimentarily manipulating / sharing" images. - Apps in category (4): No, not on the default medium. These are expert applications used by, well, advanced or expert users who have a clear idea of what they want to do and are looking for an application to do so. - Apps in category (5): Not sure, this should basically depend on how many people actually digitally draw or paint using their GNULinux/Xubuntu box. I _guess_ the amount of people doing so at least is way smaller than the amount of people messing with digital camera stills once in a while. Well, disclaimer: This is strictly my $0.02 and it is a view on the world done by someone who is pretty much "photo-centric". However, from this point of view, I don't think the question is whether to "replace" the Gimp. The question is whether an advanced application like Gimp is required or well-placed in a default installation (given it's just and exactly an "apt-get install gimp gimp-plugin-registry" away. The question should be what kind of "imaging requirements" Joe Average might have and how to best meet them. Personally, I'd vote for inclusion of gthumb as a modestly-weight "category (2) app" as main image management application in the default installation which provides image viewing and most of the basic functions (scaling, cropping in terms of "cutting away" parts of the photo, removing red eyes, uploading to flickr, facebook, photobucket, ...) in an easily accessible tool. Oh well, so much for that. :) K. -- Kristian Rink * [email protected] * http://node.zimmer428.net "Time moves in one direction, memory in another." (William Gibson) -- xubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/xubuntu-devel
