I love the contrast between this and one of the next comments:

>In my honest opinion, GIMP is a horrific piece of software.

Both are absolutely true!

GIMP has been, for many years, the best free graphics software available. At the same time, it's so horribly anti-user (and anti-usability) that if it wasn't free software, the company behind it would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.

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tadfisher 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"Anti-user' and "anti-usability" are far too harsh. Outdated, yes. A product of 1990s-era UX design, absolutely. But every changelog has some mention of a UX improvement, and actually using the product at version 3.0 is, dare I say, pretty enjoyable once you unlearn things and pretend it's Photoshop 6.0. Single-window mode by default helps a ton.

I have used far worse software from commercial outfits. You would not believe how much aerospace and specialized CAD stuff still uses Motif and doesn't support scroll wheels or extra mouse buttons.

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b112 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My biggest beef is the UI constantly goes through massive changes at each release. Options moved, mysterious new configs, literally it is as if you're using an entirely new piece of software every few years.

For those of you who daily drive GIMP, well you'll be up to speed quickly. For those of us that use it once a month or so, for a day, it quickly becomes exceptionally annoying.

I'm happy if the UI isn't the best. I frankly don't care what the software looks like, or if the GUI is purdy. I just want it to work, work well, and frankly that menu items don't magically disappear, get merged into other sub-menus, or that now you can suddenly close a tool, and never ever get it back without finding some obscure menu item to re-activate it.

And if you use GIMP frequently, and are about to say "But, that's easy, you just..." then you're not a casual user.

There are more casual users than you think.

(this goes right up there with devs who change config options in files from option= to Option=, and configs= to config=.

I mean, leave it alone. Forever.

"Updated config options to bring them inline with StudlyCaps" or whatever turns my day into a ragefest filled anxiety attack on upgrade.

"Changed all config names to US English from British spelling." What?! OK b112, you now have to deal.

I don't want to deal. I want to eat doritos.)

	▲	cmyk_student 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's funny to hear that, because we get a large number of complaints that we haven't changed GIMP's interface at all from 2.10 to 3.0 and that's why we're "failing". We try to be respectful of existing users (and again, we get lots of complaints that doing so "holds GIMP back"). If you have some examples of massive changes you've dealt with (and from what version to what version), I'm happy to look into them further.

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locallost 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The one saving grace one might find is that a lot of people trying it already had some experience with e.g. Photoshoot and are already influenced by it. And just because Photoshop does it one way doesn't mean it's the way. But honestly, no, it's just bad bad. Thanks for all the hard work for free, but it's just really difficult to use[1]. It would've been better to do less.

[1]gave up on it 10 years ago, so don't know, maybe things changed

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goodmythical 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think that the weakness doesn't lie within GIMP itself.

Imagine that you are a car hobbyist. You know your way around a wrench.

But then you step in to an F1 garage or even your local repair shop run by that one guy who inheritted his father's shop in the 50s and has thrown a tool away since the Reagan administration.

It's going to be possible for you to do everything that you know how to do, and even to learn some things along the way, but you're not going to be anywhere near as efficient as you were in your garage where the only tools you have are the ones you regularly use and you know the locations (perhaps roughly) of everything.

The same could be applied across any number of domains. Knowing your way around and ambulance isn't going to go as far as you might think it would in a surgical suite.

Knowing some python isn't going to get your pulls accepted in Canonical, Debian, etc.

Knowing your professors preffered citation methodology isn't going to gaurantee academically succesful searching of The Library of Congress or even the New York Public Library.

etc etc etc

GIMP represents nearly the totality of knowledge relating to image manipulation, and you can lay it out to perfectly match your personal knowledge and workflow, but it simply is not possible to have it automatically laid out to perfectly match everyone's workflow.

Could it be more intuitive? Perhaps, but moving things around now is liable to break the workflows of tens of thousands who have learned to use and love GIMP the way that it currently is.

For instance, having only ever used GIMP as my primary image manipulation tool, I can and do have some of the same complaints against [insert other software] that people routinely level against GIMP. The last time I tried to use Photoshop I spent more time in tutorials and help pages than doing actual image editting because Photoshop is as unfamiliar to me as GIMP is to a Photoshop user.

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rzerowan an hour ago | parent [-]

I wonder what would it take o implement layout compatibilty packs , to allow the user at install to select which layout they are most comfortable with , v2.0 , Photoshop compatible , stable or experimental. All calling into the same base.

Of course such an effort most likeky would need to be a paid effort fulltime rather than volunteerr work.

It always felt sad to me it never reached the usablility/familiarity that Blender has.

	▲	cmyk_student 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There's a third-party theme called PhotoGIMP which changes the layout and shortcuts to match Photoshop: https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP Longterm, we have a roadmap item for an Extensions platform: https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#extensions So basically, you could download plug-ins, themes, shortcut presets, etc, directly into GIMP. We have a lot of pieces done - we just need someone to focus on it to finish.