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GIMP is gearing up for a massive upgrade
(www.gimp.org)
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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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I used to work in schools IT and I managed to get a lot of FOSS tools into regular use amongst both staff and students; Audacity, Libre Office, Firefox, even Debian in a few IT labs... but the one that never stuck was GIMP because no teacher is going to tell their class they'll be using GIMP today.
I know this is a tired point and will probably never be fixed, but that name causes more problems than anything else.
We should rename it the Gnu Image Leveraging Framework.
proffessors could say "we'll be using Gnu Image processing" or "Gnu Imp" if they wanted to get lame about it. The real big knoggin move is to just call it GIMP and silently dare your students to act like children
Kids would eat you alive.
Tell me you've never tried to control a class of teenagers without telling me you've never tried to control a class of teenagers.
What puritanism does to a mf
Well shit, I never cared about the name but this convinced me because adoption and teaching about FOSS matters more.
I only learned about this "negative connotation" from people yelling about how GIMP name is bad.
I work in municipal government, and I just renamed the shortcuts on my work computer to avoid having to explain it to another mayor or councilmember. I think they're adding Photoshop to the bufget anyway next year. GIMP is good for free, but I have to admit Photoshop really is the king of photo editors.
I do really like Inkscape though.
The FOSS software I find to be the most impressive, however, is QGIS. I have ArcGIS and QGIS both installed on my machine and use them both heavily. For data processing, I usually go with QGIS, but then I make most of my deliverables in ArcGIS because it has a way better layout editor and lots of other software and angencies require me to use ESRI REST services.
But I can go with the cheapest ESRI licenses because I don't have to pay an extra 4 grand a year for the "Erase" tool when I can punch a hole in a shapefile in QGIS for free. And I openly said as much in my last meeting with ESRI when they were trying to get me to upgrade.
This is always interesting to hear because as someone who went school in a non English speaking country, GIMP was obviously never an issue. In most of the world the name isn't an issue.
I only learned about that alternative meaning years later.
But for millions of people it is… the fact that it isn’t for some cultures does not negate the influence for those where it is. Companies like Apple will skip numbers and names if it’s a problem in one place (like say China) because they realize more adoption is useful. Old Gimp heads though just whine about America or some shit and wonder why nobody fucking uses it after 30 years.
Everything about this project is always saying they’re looking for input and design ideas but their old-ass users shoot down every person that has anything to say, many of whom have ideas from working as actual professionals for those same thirty years.
I tried Debian for two hours and said fuck this and I went straight back to Ubuntu. I might try it again when I know more about it. For now I'm still very much a noob. Debian's still Ubuntu's boring cousin to me and I'm working on making it the fun one I want to invite over.
monkey paw curls, we keep it gimp but pronounce it gimp
...
How dare you make me sound that out in my head.
Could you eli5 why gimp doesn't work as a name, i genuenly don't know...
It’s a derogatory term as well as a BDSM term.
Is it derogatory?
Definitely thought it was a humiliation thing
Ahhh ok noted
Genuine question, how did you know BDSM but not gimp?
One can know about a general topic and not know the details of the topic.