It doesn't take very long at all to get familiar with basic Gimp features. The investment in time is minimal and worth it. You could probably figure how to do everything you can do in MSPaint in Gimp in 20-30 minutes.
And then when you need it the next time 3 months later you need to invest the same 20-30 minutes to relearn how to use Gimp. It isn't only Gimp that have this problem, it is hard for power users to understand the problems casual users has with using software
Protip: get an SSD. It improves your life in many ways. Three examples I notice between my girlfriend's HDD-based laptop and my SSD-based one:
- A game, Factorio, takes literally 5 minutes for her to get to the main menu. For me it takes about 30 seconds.
- Using `time gimp` and hitting alt+F4 immediately, I get about 2.14 seconds. For my girlfriend this indeed takes a little bit, though not a minute.
- Booting up (from cold) is maybe 20 seconds for me. For her, this takes more than a minute on Ubuntu and more like 2-3 minutes on Windows (it boots in the same time as Ubuntu, but then programs need to load which make it slow for another 1-2 minutes).
Not everything benefits from it, like web browsing or email is not I/O-bound, but lots of things go a lot faster for the investment. Especially for laptops, it's also quieter, supposedly uses a little less power, and won't die as fast from dropping it. I'd highly recommend it.
I'm not putting off your computer as being the blame for GIMP being slow - indeed, it's kinda silly that it takes so long to start, especially the first time - but I just figured you had an HDD and think the vast majority of people will benefit from an SSD. Even my grandma got one a few weeks ago and is super happy with it.
> the Linux version starts up faster than the Windows one.
Indeed. 4-5 secs to open GIMP on Linux here on HDD, and practically instant once cached.
Maybe try and start with some command-line options. Useful ones in your case:
-d, —no-data
Do not load patterns, gradients, palettes, or brushes. Often useful in non-interactive situations where startup time is to be minimized.
-f, —no-fonts
Do not load any fonts. No text functionality will be available if this option is used.
If you only use it once yeah. I'm super casual and just use it for cropping and resizing and whatnot, and have used it dozens of times. Worth 20-30 minutes.
I am a digital artist and I've been using Photoshop since 2000s. I still find it infinitely more comfortable to open mspaint and do quick resizing or image editing there.
When I forced to use gimp I simultaneously want to a) kill myself b) kill developers of gimp and their family members.
Well, it depends on what you're used to. Although I'm just a casual user, I've been using GIMP for years, and had similar feelings to yours when I had to use Photoshop once.
