Bonjour, A traduction (approximate, thank you http://babel.altavista.com/tr) of an article you can read in the web site http://macosx.be (http://macosx.be/unix/mythegimp/mythegimp.html) When a O.S. is not perfect, the only way to sell is to devaluate the other O.S. ============================================================ The MacGimp Myth Many electronic mails require of us why we do not speak about MacGimp and The Gimp in general. The MacGimp.org site even wonders, without laughing, why Steve Jobs did not speak about them at the time of the keynote of New York . At the request of many readers, here our opinion on what became a true myth: The Gimp, program good than Photoshop, which goes to kill Photoshop, which is free, which is fabulous, fast and pass we from there... The Gimp, general information. We have in the past have the occasion to test Gimp under Linux. This program is in Photoshop what Pascal Obispo is to Michel Polnareff. In other words, this program is pale and insipid copy carried out with goes-quickly during their spare time by a composite team beyond the world and holding account in no manner of the needs of the professional graphic designers. Show The Gimp with a professional graphic designer and macosx.be, such Mrs Irma, predicts the future to you: your graphic designer-guinea-pig will look at the screen roughly 2 minutes 30 seconds, of an air initially astonished, then amazed. Some tears will start to bead under its eyes while its zygomatic muscles will warm up for the great burst of laughter final, the 2 minutes 30 last. Some amusing details: - No support of the CMJN; - an interface as intuitive as the manner of making start the 2CV of my friend Marc; - NO support for the plug-ins, except those created for The Gimp (of the effects of lenses or extraterrestrized letterings, you will see some on the images carried out with The Gimp, one would believe yourselves returned in 1994); - ceaseless not-plantings (The Gimp is perfect and thus does not plant: it simply points out to you that you should reprogram yourself such functionality, which is experimental, but functioning sometimes). In short, the program chooses itself which tools you can use and at which time. - Support of the XWindow fonts and not of the native fonts of Mac (must we specify that they are hideous?) Graphic applications requiring a XWindow server. The server XWindow (of which more répendu is the server XFree86 4.0.x) does not have quite simply its place in Mac OS X the fact that Mac OS X is a Unix is undoubtedly a pledge of quality, but Mac OS X is much more than one Unix among the others: Quartz and Aqua coupled with the composite interface Mac/NeXT come to fill an obvious lack in all the Unix, namely a powerful display system and a studied and unified graphic interface. The display system XWindow (and not X-Windows, as it is too often read) is heavy and painful legacy of the past, passed by which the " server " of display was often on another machine that the " customer " who displayed on the screen what the server communicated him. All celà was done via TCP/IP. Today, the server and the customer are in 99 % of the cases (99,99 % on Mac) on the same machine. **time-out** this layer server be thus become completely superfluous and, not satisfy to slow down the display, for some reason obvious of error architectural, prevent in addition to de carry out number of effect of display current (a simple antialiasing be a nightmare), which be sometimes reach thanks to some artifice return possible grace by the fact that the customer and the server be physically on the same machine -- and of course sûr function not if the machine customer must indeed be distant some machine maidservant. The myth of the magic bearing of the Unix applications towards Mac OS X. The converted users of Unix (and often of Linux), must understand that it is not while trying to re-use their unchanged tools under Mac OS X that they will arrive at something, but by rewriting the parts depending on the XWindow system or APIs rising from XWindow (API = Application Programming Interface or system of interfacing for the programming of applications ) in Cocoa, like made Eric Peyon for the Fire application). In addition, to implement GTK+ or QT (two API comparable with Cocoa, but very random as for their evolution, with their operation and their unification: no the guidelines here) under Mac OS X is also a coarse fundamental error: a pledge of serious is that one and only one API are used for all the programs within a same operating system. Those among you who seek a real alternative to Photoshop, less expensive and already available under OS X and which more is compatible with its plug-ins, would make well throw a glance with Painter . A last word, exceptionally in my proper name: I hesitated a long time before writing this opinion in this Unix heading. It is indeed flamer and even appears pretentious for the Unix/Linux community. The questions about The Gimp having become numerous, I based myself on the answer to the most relevant question which we received to write an article. However, we wanted to create an informative site and we will thus give information such as they appear to us most relevant for the daily users of Mac OS X. But I will not dare any more to leave at home without a waistcoat avoid-penguins... -- Alain Barthélemy bartydeux@gminformatique.com http://bartydeux.gminformatique.com