[mattkevan]

Photoshop's interface is getting worse [1] and everyone hates Adobe, so there's a great opportunity for a tool like GIMP to step up and become the default alternative. It's got a lot of features, it's been around for a long time and has reasonable name recognition (for better or worse).

However, unless they do a Blender and make a sustained effort to improve the UI, understand what people want and how it fits into professional workflows, it's never going to happen.

The attitude seems to be: If you don't like it, fuck you. I think they're genuinely happy with how things are. The inscrutable UI and off-putting name are features not bugs, keeping away the sort of people they don't want.

[1] https://unsung.aresluna.org/photoshops-challenges-with-focus...

[mixmastamyk]

Gimp has nothing like the interface deviations Blender did, like right click selection, etc. So there isn’t anything of that scale to fix.

[cmyk_student]

Far from it - we even have a dedicated design site where we ask for UX-specific bug reports and improvement requests from users: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...

We then discuss and test with the reporter and volunteer designers, and try to implement once some consensus has been reached. We welcome feedback from more users, so feel free to contribute your thoughts and design/workflow issues!

[mattkevan]

Ah design by committee, that well known route to design excellence!

[cmyk_student]

I believe it's a step up from "design by whichever developer implemented a particular feature", which was the norm. :)

More seriously, we're trying to attract more designers and design feedback, just like we do for coding. We're also trying to document UX standards (see https://developer.gimp.org/core/ for early work) so there'll be a consistent experience as new developers join and features are added.