Re: [Gimp-developer] GIMP System Requirements

[Robert Krawitz <rlk alum mit edu>]

On Wed, 23 Oct 2013 18:16:35 -0400, Jay Smith wrote:
> On 10/23/2013 05:52 PM, C R wrote:
> > With GIMP, you just download it and try it out to see if it fits your
> > needs. There is no consumer risk involved with doing this....
>
> While I am in agreement with virtually everything you have said...
> I beg to differ with the point about "no consumer risk".  Over the years, I have "lost" days of my life to 
> such "try it and see if it works for me" situations.  To _me_ there is a very high "consumer risk".  I know 
> that nothing is perfect and even paying lots of money usually does not mean that there is "no consumer 
> risk" in terms of time.  However, if (ha!) I knew FOR SURE (ha!) in advance that my choice was a) a couple 
> of days of testing and struggling vs b) paying a few hundred dollars, I would rather pay the few hundred 
> dollars.

The problem -- and this is more so with GIMP than with many apps -- is
that it really comes down to what you want to do and your level of
patience.  If you're using it on web images (maybe 1 MP or less), you're
not doing anything fancy, and you're running a light weight desktop,
particularly on an older distribution, you might be perfectly happy with
256 MB of memory and a Pentium 3 processor.  If you're working on
multi-layer 50 megapixel images, and you're doing a lot of transforms,
you might find even 8 GB unpleasant.

I'd be pretty confident in saying that you're not going to be happy with
GIMP on a <16M color, <1024x768 display regardless of what you're doing.
But beyond that, it's so dependent on your image size and structural
complexity that I'd be completely unwilling to specify a minimum
processor, memory, and disk space requirement.

With an office suite like LibreOffice, there's typically less variation
in document size.  I have some spreadsheets in the 10 MB range, but this
is very big for a spreadsheet and corresponds to no more than a 20 MP
image with a single layer; plenty of people work with images that dwarf
this.

> > Maybe someone can toss together a benchmarking plugin that takes some
> > sample images, and processes them in various ways and produces a "user
> > experience" rating...
>
> That is a really good idea.  It would be even more useful if combined that with a web page where testers 
> then post their results in a very structured manner including information about their specific hardware, 
> etc.  Thus other potential users can see in advance how a specific Gimp version works in a specific 
> environment.  (Or are there still too many variables?)

Yes, there are.  There's so much variation in image size, and what
people do, out there that none of this would be of any general value at
all.
-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk alum mit edu>

MIT VI-3 1987 - Congrats MIT Engineers 5 straight men's hoops tourney
Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom  --  http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton