this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
998 points (99.7% liked)

Open Source

38894 readers
209 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 204 points 3 months ago (105 children)

Man, after decades, why does GIMP still have a marketing problem?

Just visit https://www.gimp.org/ and compare it to https://www.adobe.com/ca/products/photoshop.html

Just assume both did exactly the same thing and cost the exact same amount (free or otherwise). Which would you choose based on their website?

Why does GIMP (and pretty much all FOSS) have to be so secretive about their product? Why no screenshots? Why not showcase the software on their website?

It's so damn frustrating that every FOSS app appears to be command line software, or assumed that the user knows everything about it already.

Devs, you might have a killer piece of software, but screenshots go a long way to help with gaining interest and adoption.

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 17 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

I would have to choose GIMP (in spite of this awful name) because that page loaded without javascript and the photoshop page requires me to enable javascript.

I know I'm being a bit facetious, here, but... Adobe can afford to hire full time front end devs and designers. FOSS projects can't really compete with Adobe's investors.

[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 months ago (4 children)

LOL. Brother, I get what you're saying, but I think you missed the point. If Random User X is just looking for an image editor, and they are presented with a few options they know nothing about. Do you think they're going to even bother with the one image editor that doesn't have any screenshots?

Just another comparison, a little more relevant: https://www.rawtherapee.com/

You know EXACTLY what it is and what it does within about 2 seconds. That would be more than enough information for someone to at least make the effort to download the software.

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You're right. I wasn't familiar with rawtherapee but just seeing that home page immediately clued me into the fact that it was some kind of image program. Didn't even need to read a single word.

Come to think of it, there have been a number of times where I've wondered about what a foss project does/looks like and I think a single screenshot would've just been a big help in understanding how it behaves.

[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 months ago

Come to think of it, there have been a number of times where I’ve wondered about what a foss project does/looks like and I think a single screenshot would’ve just been a big help in understanding how it behaves.

Yes!! I'm glad I was able to illustrate my point better.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (101 replies)