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by dom0 3171 days ago
> It's one of the most important projects for the open source desktop, for example GTK (formerly GIMP Toolkit) is one very important outcome.

Is it? GTK/Gnome was created over a historical footnote and to this day is more of a hindrance than helpful overall. It effectively bisected the entire Linux desktop community and caused so much time lost with downstream application developers.

GIMP is obtuse to use and provides an UX that has been out of touch for many years. It doesn't support features that are just bog-standard in other products, for years. (Like >8 bit colour). It is exactly the kind of amateurish project that gave FOSS GUIs their bad reputation.

2 comments

Gimp is the only free alternative to photoshop that actually measures up feature wise. That its UI doesn't exactly mirror Adobe's isn't a negative. Many of Gimp's differences (key shortcuts to paste into a new image or drag and drop resizable select boxes, etc) are things that I never realized I wanted in an image editor until I made the switch.
It doesn't have to mirror Photoshop, but the UX has to be good. With Gimp, it's not. People can claim all they want that Gimp is fine (after getting used to using it), but there's a clear voice in the public that Gimp's UX is terrible.
I used to hear people complaining more about the UI before the single window mode became available. Nowadays I hear few complaints about the UI. That isn't to say it's perfect, but I get the impression people have other concerns now.
I definitely agree, the single window mode is way better.
I’ve used multiple image editors for 25 years and the UI is fine, meaning good enough.
And yet here many of us are, satisfied with using it daily and supporting it. You would do well not to project your experiences and use cases on everybody else.
Satisfied doesn't mean things are great. People were satisfied with taxis until Uber came along and showed people a better way. There's always a better way!
Great by whose definition? I think that GIMPs UX is more than sufficient for what it is. It certainly doesn't "give FOSS GUIs their bad reputation".

It's okay if GIMP's UX doesn't suit your tastes. It suites others just fine.