Flatpak package for GIMP 0.54.1 (1996)

22 points by hawski

davepagurek

The linked notes from the artist who made the original Tux image are also pretty interesting. It mentions hand-antialiasing as a part of the process. Not something I've ever had to think about, as someone born the same year as this GIMP release!

mhd

Due to its closed source nature, the early GIMP was one of only three Motif tools somewhat common on Linux that I can think of, along with nedit and the DDD frontend to gdb.

lproven

Xpdf?
- jmc
  
  Though recent versions are now based on Qt!
  - mhd
    
    And in addition, the rendering part of the old version is now behind almost every Linux PDF reader as the "poppler" library.
- mhd
  
  Oh yeah, for a while that was the best option. I can't quite remember when the official Acrobat reader came into play for me on linux, but that would've been another Motif application. Oh, and Netscape, of course!
donio

Mosaic and Netscape were not open but in very wide use.

I remember that for our college group the original pre-Mosaic reason we wanted Motif was that there were simply no other widget toolkits that seemed usable. Motif we couldn't afford. There was Xaw but it looked too special (to put it kindly) and we never figured out the API. We also looked at various Sun specific things like XView and OLIT. My friend then thought about trying to rip out the widget parts from the xv image viewer which had some weird shareware license so wouldn't have been legal but the source was available. Tcl/Tk was probably the most reasonable option but it was strongly tied to Tcl. That's why we ended up with things like tkinter in Python and PerlTk.
- mhd
  
  Yeah, it was a wild time. Motif of course was the standard on all commercial Unices by the time Linux got going, and it looked similar enough to Windows applications (as opposed to the SunView lineage). But alas, the licensing and API, and LessTif was never that much of a passion project or really desired by the community.
  
  Xaw actually got pretty decent mileage, considering just how many hacks of it were around: XaW3D, Xaw-Xpm (oh, the eyesores), neXtAw, Xaw95, Xraw, probably a few that I missed. And with the XResource system, they were pretty configurable, even the layout. Still felt like we got more skinned existing applications like xterm or xman than new code.
  
  It would've been an interesting choice if gimp would've switched to another Xt based library/widget set, but I completely understand the desire to reinvent the wheel once you're too deep in a widget set. Most people seem to do it. (Heck, I remember gathering a few people online to write missing widgets for the early Qt versions, only for the "Linux Widget Project" to turn into the "Linux Interface Project").
incanus

That tracks with what I remember - I was using nedit around that time.
fs111

There was also a version of adobe acrobat reader, but I may have only used that on Solaris back then.