
I’d love o be able to program well and work on truly native versions of Gimp and Inkscape, among other things, but it is just not a prospect the time and effort by scores of programmers take long enough to get things this far. I never cared for KDE, so was in the Gnome camp when I was into Linux, but being a graphics-person and photography enthusiast, it was never a viable alternative longterm without Adobe apps. But for someone who hasn’t got access to Photoshop, it is a good free editor to try, despite being dragged down by GTK.Įver since QT became fully-opensource, I’ve thought it a pity that Linux has this toolkit split and that the Gimp and Inkscape is on the GTK side, as QT is clearly far better, esp in the cross-platform stakes. I am just too familiar and comfortable with Photoshop. I’ll give it another go, but by past experience I don’t think it’ll grab me. Gimp 2.8.2 crashed earlier when I tried it out, on first startup, and when opening an image. And in something like an image editor which does a lot of number crunching, speed and memory footprint is important. I’ve used the ‘native’ version for a few years it seems from Macports, native-GTK hasn’t impressed me much in the past neither in the ‘nativeness’ or speed department.

Gimp is pretty great, I spent about 2 minutes and made this silly star thing, but if you have any artistic ability at all you will easily exceed my capabilities. Try Gimp out yourself, it’s free, cross platform compatible, and it beats the fudge out of something like MS Paint. Though Pixelmator remains the best Photoshop alternative for Mac users it also costs $15, and Gimp is a perfectly adequate solution for anyone looking to do some quick image editing and adjustments without shelling out any money at all. Once in Gimp you’ll find many of the familiar image editing tools, like layers, brushes, filters, text tools, color adjustments, and much more.

Note if you have GateKeeper enabled you’ll want to right-click Gimp and choose “Open” to temporarily get around Gatekeeper‘s developer restrictions in OS X. Just download, and launch the app like any other.ĭrag Gimp to the /Applications/ folder like any other Mac app to install it, then launch as usual.

The newest version of Gimp for Mac OS X is bundled as a self-contained native app, that means no X11 installations, no Xcode, nothing but a simple dmg download.
