I think the blender secret sauce is their artistic projects.

Put A bunch of artists in the same room as the developers and have them produce a work.

It ferments this amazing combination of agressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product. The GIMP project would probably be better off if they invested in a couple of rounds of this.

I think blender always had an amazing, ahead of it's time interface. It did lean overly hard on knowing the hot keys, probably a product of it being an in house tool but the opensource versions have worn a lot of those rough edges off(menus to provide clues) while keeping that same super smooth workflow core.

> but are awful at UX

This is such a weird trope.

For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.

Part of what makes this so much of an issue is that in FOSS projects, the things that get worked on tend to either be low-hanging fruit and/or a personal peeve of one of the engineers. Everything else is at high risk of falling through the cracks and being ignored or forgotten.

It’s kind of the open source counterpart of how in proprietary software, some types of bugs tend to get perpetually kicked down the road to make room for development of features that are perceived to be of higher likelihood of increasing revenue.

In theory, FOSS projects have more agency to correct this class of problem than their proprietary analogues do because they’re not subject to the same economic pressures. This however requires leadership with a strong vision for the project and soft skills to unify and motivate contributors to work on not-so-sexy bits, and this type of individual is rare in that space.

> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.

That is what product managers are for; someone to lead the product's direction, ensure quality control, and to instill taste. That requires being able to say when a feature is poorly implemented or outright bad and unnecessary -- it's not always just kinks. The problem is that this collides with the collaborative ethos of open source software. But when it's not done it's the users who suffer.

We should consider public funding for open source projects.

Creating something for the benefit of humanity is great and all but ultimately, programmers need to eat.

For Blender I agree. I don't feel like gIMP ever hit that moment. Blender appears to be serious competitor to 3DSMax/Maya/Houdini etc. gIMP does not appear to be a serious competitor to Photoshop even after they shipped v3

I think it's an issue of "what matters".

FLOSS software is often made people who are interested in the thing being done. The UI to do it is something that can be fixed "later". But later is always later. There's always another feature to implement before you can sit down and really fix that UI.

The people that use Maya have been using Maya since the days of it being the only thing available. When you have students as young as junior high school getting active in computers and graphics, they have no money. Using myself as an example, I was a frequent user of newsgroups like a.b.m.a. to find the software to learn how to use. Now that I'm a "professional" by earning money with software I "borrowed" while learning, I now pay for all of it.

Now that tools like Blender, Resolve, etc are all available for FREE, it's a no brainer why the younger folks entering into the scene are using them. Hook them while they are young, they'll use it for life. On top of that you can add any converts, once you have a features worthy, as everyone likes free. With places like Reddit and YouTube, you can even forgo support and crowdsource it.

We have to keep in mind though that many open source projects started as something that someone wanted and then made. It probably worked just like that person wanted and then it grew. Maybe it is because they weren't too versed in UI/UX design.

Another thing is that many classic open source projects don't have a "I want to grow my user base" mindset. Why would they. It's not like they get paid.

Big overhauls also always have the risk of alienating current users. I learned Blender on the pre 2.8 UI and because I use it rarely I still sometimes struggle with the new shortcuts.

Blender clearly benefited from the change but the real spirit of open source is: you don't like it then help fix it.

The problem with (3D) CAD I've heard is that the Open CASCADE CAD kernel is a huge mess. So as much as they update and fix FreeCAD (and they've made a lot of good progress, but it's still very rough around the edges) they're always going to be hampered by that. And making a new CAD kernel is a massive undertaking.

Unfortunately it’ll be a lot harder for CAD because of all of the other lock in like PLM/ERP integration. A good PLM is half the product. I know a good amount of companies that do not use solidworks because their PLM is absolutely crappy (but I haven’t been a MechE for a couple years now so things could have changed)

Some complexity is of course an inherent part of the domain, and you can never truly get around it. At best you can stick to sensible defaults for the basic user and initially hide the most complicated parts until they are needed.

On the other hand: there is no reason whatsoever something as trivial as drawing a circle has to be as complicated as launching a rocket in GIMP. It certainly doesn't lack the technological scaffolding, and UX-wise people would already be ecstatic if they just cloned how 30-year-old version of Microsoft Paint did it. So why doesn't it have a Circle Tool yet, despite the massive amount of requests for it? The only possible explanation left seems to be an active disdain towards basic non-technical people: the UI is hard to use because they want it to be hard to use.

> To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple

The interface doesn't have to be simple. What it should be is conforming to established UI patterns and conventions. Blender used to be incredibly unintuitive even to people who had never used any other 3D modeler before.

GIMP fought against single window mode for ages despite the majority of people wanting it.

It's the same with KiCad!

Version 5 was kinda-sorta usable - but buggy and painful. In practice everyone would tell you to just download the nightly build of version 6 instead, as the UX improvements were massive. It became a genuine joy to use, and with the death of EAGLE the no-brainer choice for every hobbyist.

Since then development has raced ahead, with regularly scheduled released chock-full of both small quality-of-life improvements and new features focused on professional use. It's still a tier behind the likes of Altium, but these days KiCad is a very solid choice for everything but the most high-end PCBs.

It is definitely good enough to build your small consumer business electronics business around, which means there are suddenly a lot of potential users willing to throw a few bucks at it to solve the remaining small papercuts and missing features they run into.

The negative example of Blender is Inkscape. I've used Inkscape in ~2015. I picked it up again in 2025. Surprisingly, it feels even slower and more unstable than a decade ago. I start thinking it's an app that will never reach a mature state.

It's not that UI/UX people don't want to contribute, it's that the coders have to be convinced that UI/UX matters enough to start including designers' contributions. The type of people making FOSS stuff also tend to be the people who prioritize code, make "good enough" interfaces, and see UI/UX work as fluff. This is thankfully less true today than it was in the past, but it's always been part of my experience around FOSS.

Almost no one is being paid to make desktop apps any longer. And the UI/X discipline did not make it to the web for whatever reason. The last gasps became designers and settled on more padding, rounded corners, and hidden scrollbars. Most of which are pretty but counterproductive. Dead discipline except for very large products.

The context was also weirdly random, probably with some logic for longtime Blender users but just weirdly random.

The usual context for modelling, [[[ Mode(model/uv/anim) -> Object/Mesh selection -> Face/Line/Vertex selection ]]] that is found [[[ (top-to-bottom)-(left-to-right) ]]] since Blender 2.8 and most other programs used to be placed [[[ middle of screen-top of screen-middle of screen ]]], just an insane order and that stuff was actually defended by Blender-die-hards (that probably used keybindings for these context switches anyhow).

There is still things placed "weirdly", but once we got past that it became immensly better (and not rage-quit worthy).

For anyone who happens to have an Intel Mac and is discouraged, Blender 4.5 is the LTS version and is still supported until at least 2027, and Blender is accepting patches that improve support.

https://devtalk.blender.org/t/deprecation-and-removal-of-mac...

Companies don't take down listings for many reasons: make it look like they have more money to expand than they actually have, slow down the job seeker so their competition moves just slightly slower, there's no benefit in taking it down, if someone is actually reading the applications maybe an exceptional applicant will come that fits for another role in the company, drive up costs for the competition (hey boss everyone is hiring for my role so give me a raise), etc. [edit: gram mer and spolling]

Blender's limited support for the Universal Scene Description format is an immediate showstopper for most medium size to large studios.

It's quite a bit of money, but a lot less than the equivalent Maya licenses. It would be great if more studios did this:

$240k "Press release, tech blogpost, dedicated product manager for your area" https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/

Meta are paying $30k per year, which is crazy really, when you think how much Blender has assisted in getting content onto their platform. Nvidia is better at $120k, but again, think how many graphics card buys Blender cycles has driven.