this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Wait, so are people going to claim that the start-up speed is the problem with GIMP on Windows and not the god awful UI? This is the problem with the Linux crowd. You guys write software to write software and not because you are a user of that software. A clunky UI - which is far, far too common on open source applications - will cost someone a heck of a lot more than a few seconds in getting work done.
So, what are you going to do about it ? Contribute ? Learn the ins and outs of gimp, and propose some UI changes ? And if you don't have time to do that, who does / who cares enough for that ? People who code stuff like GIMP generally don't really care for UI, or have the time. They're volunteers, passionate people. Not designers.
That's also a broad generlization. Firefox has bad UI/UX ? (Sometimes yeah on some niche things but I wholeheartedly believe google is at fault somehow) What about Krita ? Blender has been doing UI work last I heard of it, so that's also that. Paint.net was also open source. Chromium has bad UI ? Android ? Vs Code ? GNOME ? KDE ? Element ? Jitsi ? Signal ? Wordpress ?
Yeah, gimp sucks. And the type of people who are "linux elitists", that tell you you suck for not enjoying bad UI, also suck. But why not make a meaningful change to the world ? Try to hope for a world where GIMP is actually usable ?
If all you want to do it text your programming muscles, then do so. But don't claim you've developing a useable piece of software. I mentioned this to someone already... A far better alternative is Photopea. It's browser based and is partially open source. While GIMP has almost 100 people tied to the project, Photopea was written by ONE guy. And it's great. Again, within the limitations of what browser-based software can offer. But it mirrors Photoshop as closely as possible and is a joy to use as long as the project doesn't get too heavy (because again, it runs in your browser). So since clearly GIMP wasn't written by people who give a shit about the end product as a real usable tool, then maybe the Linux community should stop proclaiming that it's a real usable tool whenever someone asks "ok, but what kind of software can I use on it?".
You sidestepped the topic of "open source apps have bad UI/UX by default", that's just not true. I agree that GIMP has pretty bad UX, there's no questioning it, it also has a long history and that means technical debt when devs don't work on it very consistently, the Photopea dev got to start anew so they could skip working on old code. I think we also underestimate that the widespread availability of clear UI and UX guidelines in recent years that came with the emergence of new platforms like Material for Android initially and then all other platforms subsequently, helps a lot in shaping how non-designers can imagine the layout of their software.
The project is also important to their livelihood (since it is commercial) so the dev will put all their effort into making it better.
This is meant more as an explanation rather than an excuse of course, but it's also to say that yeah, maybe if one of us wanted they could make the next cross platform Photoshop, but they need the skill, the time and the incentive to work on it. Plenty of free software manages to have a good interface even without being commercial, but when the type of things they try to achieve is a very big undertaking you can see that most glaring examples have the money going in it (Blender), others survive on being simpler, being born later, having more dedicated developers that maybe get to work on a new exciting/pleasant language etc.
There are certainly exceptions to the rule, but you really do notice it. Another interesting example is Thunderbird that for so long has remained stagnant with its aging UI/UX rules (some might think they were always better, I guess that's up for debate) and now after painstaking work to modernize the code they were successful in also modernizing the interface quite a bit.