this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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GIMP (credit to mrAnmolv) (lemmy.xylight.dev)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/linuxmemes
 
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[–] [email protected] 89 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Linux loads the gtk libs when your desktop starts because it's a major component of gnu/gnome. Windows doesn't until you launch an app that would use it. It's not a small library.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's not a small library.

it's featherweight compared to Windows Desktop, tho

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago

Sure... But the point is that it's an apples to oranges compare when half of gimp is loaded by the OS at boot under Linux and at runtime on Windows.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Does Gimp load slowly for people who use KDE?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

I don't use KDE any more so I don't follow closely. But it used to be significantly slower. I recall some years back they were working to change KDE loading of gtk libs but I'm not sure what came out of that

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

pro-tip you can run gimp on WSL2 and have its xwindow appear within windows just like a normal application. The ONLY way to run gimp on windows imo.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-apps

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Edge for Linux in WSL lmao how many layers do we need

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Here is the WSLg repo if you're curious about how it works: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

Basically, Microsoft take a Wayland compositor (Weston) and modify it to add support to enable automatic RDP connection to the Windows host. They also added support to RDP individual application window instead of the full desktop. The result is the Wayland compositor will render the application windows over RDP when you run any GUI app.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 11 months ago

Everything loads slower on Windows. I've run programs through fucking Wine that still load faster than they do on Windows.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 11 months ago (4 children)

It's been a while since I've used GIMP, but I recall even loading it on Linux taking over a minute.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sometimes it does take a few seconds for me as well, but not even close to a full minute. That must’ve been on an HDD, right?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

It's never taken more than like 2 seconds to open on any of my computers

[–] kenbw2 6 points 11 months ago

Takes a while for me on Linux too. No idea if it's longer on Windows

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[–] Hazdaz 31 points 11 months ago (20 children)

Wait, so are people going to claim that the start-up speed is the problem with GIMP on Windows and not the god awful UI? This is the problem with the Linux crowd. You guys write software to write software and not because you are a user of that software. A clunky UI - which is far, far too common on open source applications - will cost someone a heck of a lot more than a few seconds in getting work done.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago

There's alot of irritation and bad general assumptions here lol. Krita, vlc, firefox, kdenlive etc exist and are amazing.

Gimp's ui is pretty bad though imo, even if it's good enough. I'd pirate and use photoshop as it is now if I could.

[–] voidMainVoid 12 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Is it a bad UI? Or is it a case of "I know where this thing is in Photoshop. Why isn't it in the same place in GIMP?"

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[–] joel_feila 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

wait people are supposed to use GIMP I think it was for that special level of hell for graphic designers

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Yes, it's a common complaint that it doesn't use GTK 4 yet, it's still on GTK 2.

[–] deejaythedj 6 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I tried to use GIMP when my PS sub ran out and I NEEDED to get some pics edited. Good GOD it took me way too long to get used to the workspace. Workflow was cut ion half, I guess that's a thing with any new program but it took me like maybe a minute to figure out Darktable when I switched from LR.

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[–] Tag365 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What fixes would you apply to GIMP's UI to make it better and more convenient to use?

[–] Hazdaz 12 points 11 months ago

Follow industry "standards" that have existed for literally 3 decades.

And yes, when a piece of software dominates it's particular industry as much as Photoshop does, it is considered a standard.

And to be clear, GIMP is just one of many such pieces of software that quite frankly are awful from a users perspective. Some will claim that "oh well it's simply because it's new software" but it's far, far more than that and it shows a complete disconnect between those who write the software and those who use the software.

I find it curious that a way better alternative to GIMP is the browser-based Photopea which is partially open source. It doesn't have the speed for heavy work because it runs in your browser, but because it mirrora Photoshop, it's workflow is far more natural to someone who edits photos for a living. Doing a quick search it looks like a single person worked on Photopea, while almost 100 people over many more years have been working on GIMP. One is typical open source software - a bunch of people trying to learn a bit of programming, trying to flex their skills but clearly not actual graphic artist.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (3 children)

What specs do you have that makes GIMP load in 2 milliseconds?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Obviously it's an exaggeration, takes about 2 seconds for me

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Just tested it, something between 1 and 2 seconds for me.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I just switched to linux it is incomparably faster. I just deleted the built in paint program because it is useless, way easier to just load gimp in 1 second. Libreoffice is also faster, although not that much faster.

[–] SirSimonSpamalot 8 points 11 months ago

Libreoffice is heavy, still loads much faster than MS Office tho

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] akash_rawal 24 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

Everything seems to be way faster on Linux than on windows for some reason.

On one occasion I tested a build that took ~10 min on windows, in a Linux VM installed on the same machine, it finished in ~1min.

I have searched around for an answer for quite some time now, I could not find any definitive reason. Some say that process creation is slower on windows, some say IO is inefficient. Still struggling to explain 10x increase in throughput.

Here is a funny instance: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/17783/why-does-emacs-take-longer-to-start-on-windows-than-on-linux

[–] gosling 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

IMO it's because Windows is targeted for general use so they don't bother optimizing anything. They'll just convince people that thei have aging hardware when things become slow and say stuffs like "unused RAM is wasted RAM" to justify taking up half of my memory on idle.

Even running Linux from a USB is still a way smoother experience than running Windows for me.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I thinks it caused by two reasons:

  • process creation has much higher overhead on windows. On top of that, the antivirus system adds additional overhead not present in Linux because it scan every process on launch and monitor its behavior until the process finished. This result in any workflow that relies on launching a bunch of processes (e.g. make-style compilation which launch the compiler process recursively) to be very slow on Windows.
  • file access on windows is also significantly slower on windows due to its filesystem filter. Also, antivirus typically hook into this filter and inspect every opened files. You can imagine this would result in significant slowdown for any workflow that relies on opening a lot of small files (e.g. compilation)

If you disable the antivirus (including windows defender) performance would definitely improve, but it'll still slower than on Linux.

In order to gain sufficient performance in windows, you'll have to use threads instead of processes (basically a single program doing everything instead of chaining multiple program Unix-style) and put your data in a single file so it can load all at once instead of in a bunch of small files loaded recursively. Basically a complete opposite of what people do on Linux.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

for some reason.

bloat

I ran Atlus for a second before installing PopOS and Windows can be just as fast if you remove literally everything

Atlus suffers from the fact that it's still just windows though so all the underlying issues are still there.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago
[–] kluevo 10 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Am I going crazy or something? Gimp loads in under 5 seconds on windows for me, and that's with an absurd amount of crap (unity, blender, a vm, and 400+ browser tabs across 5 browsers) running in the background.

[–] akash_rawal 6 points 11 months ago

Gimp loads in 500ms for me, on linux running on a mid-range SSD-using laptop.

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[–] Psaldorn 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Me: Export this 256x256 PNG.

Gimp on windows: Bro, you'd better get a drink and a snack.

[–] TheBERFA 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I think you need a better PC my man. Takes me under a second for images upwards of 2000x2000.

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[–] Willer 6 points 11 months ago

Nope this is truth. even with SSD on my part

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Kind of funny because I was using an old laptop earlier to recover a partition that Mac fucked up.

Instead of clicking GParted, I accidentally clicked GIMP. For a Core2Duo computer with 4GB RAM, 2 seconds wasn't an exaggeration.

Distro was Manjaro.

[–] ColdWater 4 points 11 months ago

still faster than Photoshop tho, but most of the time I use MS Paint 3D anyway

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