[HN Gopher] Gimp 2.10.32 on Apple Silicon (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
Gimp 2.10.32 on Apple Silicon (2022)
Author : wiihack
Score : 138 points
Date : 2023-01-15 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gimp.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gimp.org)
| aroman wrote:
| Why not offer this as a universal binary? Seems like a bunch of
| extra work to generate two separate DMGs and try to point users
| to the right one...
|
| Regardless, congrats to the team! Though, I'll note this blog
| post is from almost 6 weeks ago now.
| loeg wrote:
| GIMP is already a pretty big download (~240MB), so saving users
| another significant fraction of that is nice. Also helps keep
| their mirrors' costs down.
| dspig wrote:
| Along with the other answers here, using a newer Xcode and
| macOS SDK in order to build for M1 can limit compatibility with
| old macOS (OS X) versions.
| emeraldd wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised to find they're using a build tool
| chain that can't produce a universal build ... I've run into
| that before ...
| Gigachad wrote:
| Mac users are well adjusted to having to pick the correct
| binary by now and the consequences of getting it wrong are
| fairly minor.
| geraldcombs wrote:
| If the GIMP team's experience is anything like ours
| (Wireshark), it's because a significant percentage of your
| dependencies are pathologically blind to the concept of fat
| binaries, so you'd end up having to do the grunt work of
| supporting fat binaries in both your application _and_ your
| dependencies. It 's a lot easier to just add a CI builder for
| each architecture and ship separate packages.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I actually appreciate _not_ having universal binaries. I almost
| always prefer to have a smaller footprint and the current app
| for arm64 is 874.4 MB according to Finder.
| jcelerier wrote:
| hmm as a user I really don't like downloading binaries that are
| almost twice the size needed and of which I won't use half of
| chongli wrote:
| I know a lot of people like to bash on the Gimp and complain
| about features it's been missing for years (I might have even
| done some of the complaining myself!) but I really appreciate the
| work they're putting into it. This kind of low-level work with an
| ancient codebase can be pretty nontrivial and thankless work.
| Thanks, Gimp team!
| [deleted]
| below43 wrote:
| I have been a loyal Gimp user since early days. I never found the
| MacOS experience to match that of the Linux or Windows
| environments.
|
| Pixelmator has been a suitable and far superior replacement. It
| might not be Photoshop level capabilities but it more than covers
| my requirements.
| Rimintil wrote:
| Affinity tools are great.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| This is my experience entirely.
|
| I've been using GIMP for most of my life, but a lot of little
| things are off on Macs. My GIMP experience translates nicely to
| Pixelmator
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I just use photopea in the browser these days. It's pretty much
| exactly Photoshop, at least for my non-advanced purposes.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Totally agreed. Specifically, I can never get the "ants" that
| should show up when you select something. It's an ongoing bug
| that was just never fixed. So I just have to remember that a
| thing is selected. Quite irritating.
| nightfly wrote:
| I've had the ants working in my install since 2.10.28
| Steuard wrote:
| The "ants" got fixed sometime in the past few months, I
| believe, and thank goodness: it really did make GIMP almost
| impossible to use for anything complicated enough to need
| GIMP. (But they've been working on my M1 Mac for a while
| now.)
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _GIMP Turns 27_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33808435
| - Nov 2022 (291 comments)
| Kjeldahl wrote:
| In 2016, I identified and wrote about the lack of retina support
| for Gimp here https://artplusmarketing.com/gimp-and-inkscape-on-
| retina-mac... . I know Inkscape got retina support since then,
| but as I understood it, Gimp was waiting for better Mac GTK
| support or something. Does anyone know if Gimp has fixed the
| retina issues I wrote about years ago yet?
| zamadatix wrote:
| You'll want GIMP 3.0 which updates the app to GTK 3. 2.10 still
| uses GTK 2.
| [deleted]
| MaintenanceMode wrote:
| I hadn't touched Gimp in five years or more but last month I had
| to slice up some large images for easier printing and Gimp
| rescued the project. I found it easy to use, mostly intuitive,
| the install was easy, the UI was snappy, and all of the features
| I needed were available. I have to give a big thanks to their dev
| team for providing this software and saving me from the Adobe
| nightmare.
| bigdict wrote:
| What's so hard about porting to a new hardware arch? Why would
| building for ARM Macs be any different than x86? Unless you have
| assembly code it's just a matter of changing a compiler flag,
| isn't it?
| gdevenyi wrote:
| Building open source software packages for apple is difficult
| because you need to pay for apple computers to run the build
| software.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This isn't true.
|
| What is true is that if you want users to be able to just
| download and run (rather than download, run an obscure
| command, and then run your software), you have to pay Apple
| to notarize your builds.
|
| Fuck Apple for this.
| Maursault wrote:
| I'll never understand binary crybabies. Just build the damn
| thing yourself.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > rather than download, run an obscure command, and then
| run your software
|
| This also isn't true.
|
| On a Mac (or on Windows) software that has not been
| digitally signed will show a scary dialog box telling you
| that software you download off the internet might be
| malicious.
|
| On the Mac, to bypass this, you just right click the
| software and pick "Open".
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That used to be true. With the latest versions of macOS,
| you have to run xattr -rd
| com.apple.quarantine ~/Download/TheDamn.dmg
| [deleted]
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| A recent change in Ardour that used int128_t did not break on
| ARM nor did it break on unoptimized x86_64 builds, but did
| break on optimized x86_64 builds. That's just one example of
| the sort of platform-specific madness that may need to be faced
| and chased down.
| aeonik wrote:
| Just providing a link to stackoverflow discussion that seems
| to relate to this, as I was curious about the details. Looks
| like it was undefined behavior relating to casting pointers.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62738652/gcc-turning-
| on-...
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Probably comes down to either inline assembly or dependencies,
| or both.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup, I don't know if Gimp does it, but speeding up image
| filters is basically the perfect scenario where inline
| assembly can have huge payoffs.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| These days, compiler intrinsics are typically the best
| approach to that stuff. Mostly.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Linux builds of GIMP already ran on arm64, as well as a
| number of even weirder architectures (like mips or s390x).
| garethrees wrote:
| A couple of issues that came up for me when porting from x86 to
| ARM recently:
|
| 1. The x86 architecture gives programmers a lot of memory
| ordering guarantees, so that communication of values between
| threads does not usually need memory fences. ARM64 does not
| give so many guarantees, meaning that multi-threaded code may
| need additional memory fences to avoid data races. But data
| races due to out-of-order memory updates are hard to diagnose.
|
| 2. Page size in macOS is 4 kB on x86, but 16 kB on ARM, so if
| someone has hard-coded the page size rather than calling
| sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE) this may need to be discovered and fixed.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Aside from the points in the other comment, it takes time to
| change the build/test/release process for a new architecture.
| In some codebases it's a matter of adding a line to a Makefile,
| in others it's writing hundreds of lines of Bazel and a new CI
| pipeline.
| snvzz wrote:
| It also runs on VisionFive 2 (RISC-V proper), for what it's
| worth.
| coobo wrote:
| [flagged]
| Faaak wrote:
| Did you really create an account for this useless comment ?
| [deleted]
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I love that this project provides a torrent download. Nice and
| fast for me and I feel like I'm less of a burden on their
| mirrors.
| lowercased wrote:
| agreed. it downloaded faster than it took to 'install' the full
| version to 'applications' folder. leaving a seed running for a
| while to help out...
| blep_ wrote:
| [flagged]
| theunamedguy wrote:
| Porting complex applications (especially those written in C)
| from x86 to ARM can be pretty non-trivial.
|
| I can't speak to the GIMP code in particular, but I've done
| several x86->ARM source ports of other complex software, and
| each time there are things which work on x86 and don't work on
| ARM, resulting in nasty crashes, or worse.
|
| See here for one of those (not AArch64, but ARM nonetheless):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176285
| pmeira wrote:
| GIMP already supported ARM though, this is about "Apple
| Silicon". Since the post itself doesn't mention specific
| challenges, I guess it serves more to inform macOS users of
| the availability than foster discussion or provide any
| insight.
| neilv wrote:
| It's taking wins of open source, and handing them to closed
| platforms.
| rollcat wrote:
| Would you rather see it locked down to a single "open"
| platform?
| imoverclocked wrote:
| How else will GNU Hurd ever take off?
|
| Sarcasm aside, I think making open source software work
| everywhere is a win for open source. Making it run well is
| yet another win.
| neilv wrote:
| I'd rather see more people using and contributing to the
| genuinely open platforms. (This is an old problem, going
| back decades.)
|
| Part of it is a bit like an even older dynamic: "Why buy
| the cow, when you can have the milk for free?"
| shmerl wrote:
| I wonder why Gimp doesn't get more backing like Blender to
| increase the pace of development. Not enough interest from big
| backers? Surely many would benefit from dumping Adobe if
| alternatives could be on par.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| I think the difference is the amount of competition. Blender's
| alternative is Autodesk. Meanwhile there are plenty of
| alternatives to Gimp as seen in these comments.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Krita kind of leads the pack in the "FOSS image editing
| development fund" category with 17k/month. It's not the same
| primary use case but there is enough overlap in what it can do
| that I'd say GIMP is neither in the lead enough or
| differentiated enough to garner significant support easily.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| There are lots and lots of alternatives, and gimp is worse than
| every single one of those.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Its internal dev-people world is different and doesn't take
| direct critique as opportunity (or compliment e.g. I want to
| contribute with my better-outcome-vision) in the same way some
| other projects do.
|
| Not good or bad (unless you love one way more), more like
| comparatively differing in that way
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Why is the Gimp website so useless. I wanted to see if they still
| have the strange UI with floating windows but couldn't find a
| screenshot of the actual software on the site.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| You can run GIMP in either single window or multiple windows
| mode, there is a setting in the "Windows" menu that switched
| between the two. The multiple windows mode is the default and
| IMO works better if you are using a window maanager with a
| virtual desktop dedicated to it (or graphics apps in general).
| In my Window Maker-based setup i have a virtual desktop for
| graphics apps and i have it configured to always place GIMP
| windows in that virtual desktop. The main thing i'd like is
| being able to preserve the tear-off menus across launches (GIMP
| remembers the various window locations but always closes any
| persistent menu windows).
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Hasn't used floating windows by default for like 15 years.
| pier25 wrote:
| There days for minor adjustments I just use PhotoPea (the online
| photo editor). If I need more than that I use Affinity Photo or
| Photoshop.
|
| The software that I would love to see running well on macOS
| (Intel or ARM) is Inkscape.
| mort96 wrote:
| I'm still waiting for GIMP 3. At this rate I'm not convinced
| it'll ever come out. GIMP kinda looks like a discontinued project
| these days.
|
| FWIW, the Intel version has always worked okay (well, as okay as
| GIMP can feel) on Apple Silicon. It's blurry and low res and old-
| feeling, but compiling for ARM can't fix that.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-15 23:01 UTC)