[zeruch]

That's been the feeling of many of us for years (literally, when I knew a few of the GIMP folks back in my VA Linux days I rattled off stuff I thought was valuable and some of its still not there...mostly around the baroque UX, 20+ years on).

It's sad because it's not that the app isn't powerful, it's that it's obtuse to anyone but diehards.

[prox]

I tried to talk and engage in the community for a while, came up with really well researched tried-and-tested UX improvements, only to be dismissed as not “relevant”. Further engagements only seem to be showing how opaque the decision making process is (you can see this in a different form in the wordpress community btw)

[prmoustache]

You have to keep in mind that for as many non gimp user asking for a change in gimp UI there are as many current gimp users who would not necessarily see it as a good change if it hurts their muscle memory and workflow.

For example when they introduced the single window mode as default, I view it as a regression only because people can't use a window manager properly or pretend to do professional stuff on what is just a glorified video game console OS with a shitty windows management. Thanksfully they kept an option to keep using multiple windows mode for us.

[prox]

Well, I can understand the position of long time gimp users, but ultimately you have to move on to better paradigms and years of UX research. If you match it with a legacy mode, things can be a smooth transition.

In that time I used GIMP a lot and was a good moderate level user probably, but the interface kept getting in my way (unlike Photoshop were I was able to reach almost a flow state of doing things at that time)

Eventually I just moved on, but I can’t fully shake the feeling that GIMP could have been so much more. Godot and Blender which others mentioned just have done so much better in that regard. Blender had the suckiest of UX/UI but even in the face of much/some “old timer” resistance they made something that most hail as a success now.

[zeruch]

Blender has indeed been a much more "slow overnight success" than I suspect GIMP will ever be, and that's unfortunate, because its not like GIMP is lacking in the potential.