Himawari

I’m one of those 95%, and I can tell you that the problem isn’t its lack of features as much as its overly complicated UI. Last time I gave it a try, basic tasks that take me a few clicks to do in Photoshop becomes weirdly difficult in GIMP.

You want to draw a circle? Use the ellipse select tool and 7 more steps I don’t remember. You want to adjust your stroked text a little bit? You need to do the path thing from the start again.

People also love to defend it saying that I’m just “too used to Photoshop” but no, when I started using Photoshop, it wasn’t anywhere as complicated as GIMP. It’s a good thing we have Krita and Photopea (although the latter is not FOSS, only free as in free beer).

If you like using GIMP, then good for you. For me though, it just isn’t a viable alternative if I want to get things done, even if all the features are there. :)

GIMP

Open Source Alternative to Photoshop

oh god no

Truly the year of enshittification.

Mine’s Redirector. I use it to force redirection of some URLs, for example:

• Redirecting an amp URL to a non-amp
• Redirecting the URL of a small-scaled image to the URL of the original size
• Redirecting a mobile site to its desktop equvalent (e.g. Wikipedia)
• When I was using Reddit, I also used this extension to force all links to go to old.reddit.com

I’m bad at storytelling, but I will try to tell you a boring story about coincidence.

There’s that one period in my life in which my mental health was at its lowest and I was searching for an actual reason to live. It was a kind of existential crisis coupled with a very bad case of self depreciation.

No matter what reasons I could come up with to prove that my existence mattered, I could never acknowledge them, brushing them off as just coincidence - “Your existence makes your parents happy? You just happened to be their only child”, “Your were recognized as talented? No, anyone could’ve done that if they put similar efforts”, “Your friend told you you’re a good friend? No, they just don’t know you enough”. This line of thoughts was with me all the time back then. My life’s useless and inconsequential, and whether I died or lived didn’t really make a difference in the end, or so I thought.

Then, just because I was in the right place at the right time, I somehow ended up talking someone out of taking their own life. If I didn’t exist, someone might have died. That coincidence proved the usefulness of my life; it was the first time that I couldn’t deny the fact that my life did matter.

I think it’s funny how we walk through our lives and become who we are where we are at just by a chain of decisions and coincidences like that all the time. When I look back on all I’ve experienced until this day like this, I think life is kind of a wonder.

Actually, same here! I used to get overwhelmed by just the thoughts of contributing to GitHub projects too, because I think my code was kinda bad and I didn’t want to get judged at. Whenever I thought about repo maintainers/reviewers, I always imagined that they would be all like Linus Torvalds, and I was afraid of getting shamed for my poor code, lol!

I was lucky because I had skills in drawing arts, so I started by contributing icons to an Android icon pack project, which didn’t really require coding skills, and is actually something I know I can do. The maintainer of my first contribution turned out to be a very friendly and cool person instead of someone grumpy and direct I always had images of in my head! From there, I gradually learned about the tools and coding a project.

I think the truth is if you want to contribute, even when you think your code isn’t up to standard, you really still need to start somewhere. If you don’t feel any confident, start forking with a small project with some incomplete milestone that you know is something you can do, I think? Just remember that not all reviewers are out there to chew on your code, lol.