I’ve been using linux a lot lately. My old windows laptop got a horrible virus and it so disgusted me that I ended up installing Ubuntu on it, which is easily the best linux I’ve ever used.

I intend to recap my experiences on the blog a little bit, but I just wanted to mention that the GIMP, the free open source alternative to photoshop, is a real piece of crap. Usually I’m pleasantly surprised by open source software. Usually there are rough edges and ways in which it all sucks, but then there’s also cool new innovative features or the program will at least do 50% of what I need it to (see OpenOffice, which basically does everything Word 97 does, which is more than most people need).

But I think the Gimp is really amazingly awful. I’d heard so much about it, how it was such an impressive feat, but it has the worst interface I’ve ever encountered. Absolutely nothing works the way you expect it to. It’s awkward and confusing and contradicts itself in every way possible. There’s not a single task, not one solitary task, that isn’t a complete bitch and a struggle. Every single menu and window does something or has some option that makes no sense and does the complete opposite of what you want. It’s almost like the program reads your mind and then automatically reshuffles all the menus to make sure you can’t get anything done.

The awful interface would be bad enough, but I expected it to at least have basic features. You can’t change brush sizes. Seriously. Every brush is only its own size, you can’t change it. You have to make a new brush that’s the correct size whenever you want to do something like that. There are a million other features missing (I’m talking major stuff like decent selection tools, not tiny photoshop-specific luxuries).

I just wanted to get this bitching out of the way since other than this and one or two other things, my experience with Ubuntu/Linux has been very positive and I’ve found a lot of really cool, really neat free programs. Gimp, however, is not one of those programs, and Adobe certainly has nothing to fear from it.