"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 Outdated, yes.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.

▲

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.

▲

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