Two of the major contributions Ton made though are relevant.

The Blender team did not always accept code or suggestions. This has been a running theme with several people I've known that felt their work and/or ideas were rejected by people that didn't grasp their brilliance. There was a possibly unusual willingness to say no, but it was more discerning than with GIMP which gave off the appearance of vetoing virtually everything. (At one time all GIMP woes would be solved by CinePaint aka "Film Gimp").

But it was combined with the idea of the studio, in order to find out where exactly the pain points are to be addressed. In a sense this is agile software done right, where you get the users and devs alongside each other with a common goal. Unsurprisingly one result is the UI today is not mocked in the way it was 20 years ago, while the GIMP UI has remained a constant point of confusion.

I didn't see the parent comment as downloading the gimp so much as praising something blender specifically did well. The fact that it has had more impact within the industry is the evidence to support it.

Competitively, libre office has a fairly similar UI to the pre-ribbon office suite, which people at the time much preferred once the ribbon came around (before they got used to it anyway) but it hasn't had the same disruption that blender did. I suspect the file format compatibility issues and die-hard Excel fans have a lot to do with it, but it's an interesting counterpoint to the assertion that the UI is responsible for the difference in adoption rates.

Plus Gimp just works and its interface isn't that bad. It is far better than many modern apps that just don't have any significant functionality. I mean perhaps Photoshop is better in some ways, but it is not worth it to put up with Adobes Creative Toilet if you don't produce some specialized prints.

Krita is awesome too and does interfaces right as well. Bought it on Steam. But I still use Gimp since the use cases are different. But it might perhaps be worthwhile to put your open source project on Steam anyway to make some bucks. I would happily buy more.

Blender did make huge jumps in recent years. Suddly you couldn't even update as fast as they introduced new things. It is amazing by now but I would argue that its functionality was unfairly derided in the past while it was already quite capable for quite some time.

Try Krita

Captain Disillusion did a great breakdown (diss :) of that: https://youtu.be/1qSTcxt2t74?t=1273 (21m10s on for ~5 mins)

> I think the GIMP hate is almost entirely down to the difference in its UI from Photoshop.

I disagree. I use Affinity Photo 2, which also has a different interface, and it's so much easier to use than GIMP despite having more features.

I don't think its because of being different to photoshop. I tried Gimp many times during the last maybe 15 years. The UI used to be so chaotic I could not find my way around. If I tried very hard, I was basically able to do everything I needed, but with so much effort. Years ago the UI was just bunch of floating toolbars on the desktop without the possibility (or at least I couldn't find a way at that time) to have a common backdrop. All the little settings and modals were just so hard to use it was very frustrating. I had the very same experience with Inkscape over the years. I want to like those project so much, I know a lot of effort is going into that, but it didn't work for me. Same experience was with blender before the big redesign. Now blender is simply awesome and pleasant to use. I hope for such transformation for Gimp and Inkscape. (and Audacity)

This reads as "because I can do my job with it, it should be good enough for anyone". Making band posters is not really the same as being a professional creative using it all day long. It has not been adopted among those people, while Blender has. The reason is almost certainly because its UI sucks, not because it's "different".

Honestly, yeah. I know on HN we’re all used to it and over it, but the general population is not.

Like, you can claim the weird name is a celebration of how anti-corporate and unfettered the team is, but whenever I try tell people about it for the first time, it’s super distracting and adds a lot of unnecessary friction. It always goes like this:

“Photoshop licenses are so expensive, I wish there was something cheaper since many of our team members don’t need all the features.”

“Have you tried GIMP? Now hold on, I know the—“

“I’m sorry, tried what?!”

“It’s got a weird name, but a lot of people find it a really good replacement for—“

“Wait, is it named after that BDSM guy from Pulp Fiction?”

“Well it’s an acronym… (sigh) but also, yes. But it’s really solid software people have been—“

“Why on Earth would you name a product after that guy?”

I think tools like git get past this issue by being so aggressively useful and now ubiquitous, but in the early stages of a project if you don’t have the massive adoption git had (which led to a positive feedback loop of more feature development leading to more users) then you can end up dragging your name like an albatross around your neck.