leopold
Holy shit, will people ever shut up about the name? The truth is that barely anyone actually gives a shit except FOSS zealots trying to come up with excuses for why GIMP wasn’t successful (or those belonging to the anti-GIMP circlejerk that’s surfaced as of late trying to come up with new nonsensical reasons to hate a random piece of FOSS). Outside of the English-speaking world, the amount of people who give a shit about GIMP’s name is precisely zero and the word gimp is almost exclusively associated with the program. Even inside of the English-speaking world, I see GIMP used to refer to the program more often than for anything else. The amount of people actually who actually care about the name is negligible and the amount of brand recognition that would be lost from a rename would significantly outweigh the benefits of possibly having a couple more schools think about maybe starting to use GIMP.
And the truth is that as far as FOSS GUI programs are concerned, GIMP has been tremendously successful. It’s easily among the most popular, alongside Blender, Firefox and LibreOffice. It is and always has been far more popular than Krita in both professional and non-professional contexts. I’ve seen it installed on the computers of both my secondary school and college, because it turns out school computer labs need image editors and they’re not going to pay for Photoshop licenses.
But it hasn’t been more successful than Photoshop. And Firefox hasn’t been more successful than Chrome. And LibreOffice hasn’t been more successful than MS Office. And Blender hasn’t been more successful than Maya. And Godot hasn’t been more successful than Unity. And I could go on. Because no single FOSS GUI program has achieved industry standard status. Though Blender has a pretty good shot at making it.
It is significantly less powerful when compared to LibreOffice, lacking support for many features. It offers less applications than LibreOffice. It is significantly less customizable than LibreOffice. It’s built on bloated web tech. It lacks RTL support.
I am not paranoid about OnlyOffice’s origin. I also do not think it is the best office suite on Linux by a mile.
There are significantly fewer Firefox-based browsers than there are Chromium-based ones, unfortunately. Out of the ones we do have:
Floorp has much like Vivaldi gone the proprietary source-available route, so you couldn’t pay me to use it.
Pale Moon is easily the most involved of the Firefox forks, being a fork of a much older version of Firefox, but I wouldn’t generally recommend it for security reasons. It does have its uses, though. Waterfox Classic is in a somewhat similar boat. Security-wise Pale Moon is definitely the better of the two because it uses its own fork of Gecko which is maintained about as well as you could reasonably expect given the manpower available to the project. Waterfox Classic meanwhile has kinda just been left to rot since most development is going to regular Waterfox nowadays, so it’s not maintained nearly as well as Pale Moon and it’s just been collecting CVEs. But for those same reasons if all you want is the ability to use legacy XUL extensions, then Waterfox Classic is gonna have better compatibility since it hasn’t been modified nearly as heavily as Pale Moon.
LibreWolf is probably the most popular Firefox fork nowadays, but it isn’t much more than a Firefox equivalent to Ungoogled Chromium. Waterfox goes a little further, but not by much. Both can be good choices, but personally I haven’t had much reason to switch away from upstream Firefox. LibreWolf is tempting, but I can already disable pretty much all of the Firefox BS from about:config, so I don’t see the point. It’s pretty much just better defaults.
At best, another Pale Moon is what would happen. They’ve been maintaining their own hard fork of Gecko by themselves since 2016. They clearly have people capable of maintaining a browser engine, though perhaps not quite enough of them. If Firefox were to die, perhaps joining up with Goanna would be the smart move.
