I hear this complaint a lot and it always surprises me. I guess I'm just used to it after using it as my primary raster image editor for more than 15 years.

What is it that's particularly unintuitive?

As a user of Gimp of 10+ years and counting, here's some thing that have bitten me several times:

* The multi-window interface. I know you can change this, but there's no good reason for not being the default since the beginning. God help you if you close the layers window and don't know how to bring it back.

* That you cannot save to any format that it's not XCF, but that you have to export to them.

* The sliders to select tool properties, such as brush width. I can slide them (but not all the way from 100 to 0, that requires 6 slides!), I can use the up-down arrows, and I can type a value. But if I want to slide and I click it wrong, I have to enter a number. So now I have to click somewhere else first, and try again. It's frustrating.

* Overlap in functions between different tools. For instance, the perspective tool and the cage tool.

* Fine-tuning a digital tablet. I doubt anyone knows the difference between "screen", "window", and "deactivated".

* Multi-window interface, yeah, that's the first thing I change whenever I use a freshly installed Gimp. Using i3 with multi-window Gimp is a recipe for frustration.

* Only save XCF and export everything else — I was infuriated by that too at first but when you think about it it actually makes a lot of sense. People hit save with the expectation that they can continue their work later, but "saving" to a PNG (or similar) won't preserve your layers, paths, undo history, etc. That particular design decision has really grown on me even though I still hit Save every now and then when I really want to export.

* Sliders being split and acting non-standard, I'll give you that it takes some getting used to. I don't think it's terrible, but maybe enabling Ctrl for fine tuning or something would be better than splitting the slider in the middle without much except a small and somewhat ambiguous cursor change to indicate it.

* I don't think overlap in tool functions is a Gimp only thing. I would expect that in most software that doesn't exclusively operate on the lowest level possible.

* For tablet/screen mode, that's a part of Gimp that I've never used so I obviously have no idea.

> The sliders to select tool properties, such as brush width. I can slide them (but not all the way from 100 to 0, that requires 6 slides!)

Sliders are split, so the top slides over the full range and the bottom is for fine adjustments.

This is totally not obvious. No visual clue hints at this, except maybe the changing cursor shape, not very helpful.

>God help you if you close the layers window and don't know how to bring it back.

Assuming you even know you need to bring it back! I've had the experience of starting up GIMP for the first time, realizing I want to use it later instead, while trying to close it I close each individual panel first, and then the next time I opened it, it apparently remembered that I had closed all of the panels last time and helpfully didn't open them again. Took me a long time to figure out how I was supposed to do anything because I didn't realize anything was missing. I hope whoever has decided that UIs should be in many accidentally-closable-and-forgettable panels has seen the error of their ways or retired by now. See also: every single IDE...

> The multi-window interface. I know you can change this, but there's no good reason for not being the default since the beginning.

There is. It has bugs.

> God help you if you close the layers window and don't know how to bring it back.

You mean god help those people who don't see the Window menu in the menu bar?

> Overlap in functions between different tools. For instance, the perspective tool and the cage tool.

There is no overlap between those two whatsoever. None. Nada. Zilch.

> doubt anyone knows the difference between "screen", "window", and "deactivated".

Everyone who understands English?

Everyone who understands English knows that "gimp" is an offensive term.

In the Window menu you can now select one-window interface. Works great.

> That you cannot save to any format that it's not XCF, but that you have to export to them.

Every. single. time. I. use. Gimp. I. Open. The. Wrong. Save. Window.

I have a complete lack of understanding of the preference for a single-window interface other than to make GIMP look like Photoshop. I can't stand the single-window interface. Inkscape has been nothing but pain for me to try to use (and I can hand-write SVG just fine, so it isn't a lack of understanding of the format), so I must be on a different wavelength than many.

edit:

> God help you if you close the layers window and don't know how to bring it back.

This is true and awful.

Every time I need to use Gimp to make a collage of two screenshots to file a bug report I want to smash my monitor and throw it out of the window.

Gimp workflow/UI just does not stick in my brain. I can get back to using Photoshop after skipping a year and it will feel like I've left yesterday. With Gimp it is always a painful 15-minute struggle to figure out the right combination of controls to press.

I am the opposite. I can work with Gimp effortlessly, but Photoshop is endlessly frustrating. Why can't I access the things I want to do with the right click menu?

Inkscape is actually perfect tool for these tasks. You can also use it to add some annotations while you're at it.

For something that simple, why not use KColourPaint, or some other basic editor?

Last time I tried Gimp (1 year ago), I searched for an option to rotate an image a few degrees. All I found, was rotate by 90 degrees - like in pre-v5 Photoshop. I went back to Paint.net, which is good enough most the times (sadly it's closed source nowadays and gets little updates) - I open use Paint from Win7 too, for really simple things it's very fast.

Not really sure what you are talking about. "rotate" is on the main tool box and exactly how to do it was first google result.

https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-rotate.html https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-layer-rotate-arbitrary.html

Tools you know will always be faster then ones you don't know but that doesn't help people who don't yet know any of the tools.

That's because image formats are (usually?) constrained to be rectangular. You want to use layer->transform rather than image->transform for what you want (and then probably want to crop so you don't have nothing in the background on the edge).

It's not like the other unintuitive program he learned before and therefore it's bad.

Gimp is never going to change radically, since it has already fixed an user base from people that surprising likes that horrible usability (they are everywhere read some of the comments in this thread), the right thing to do is to leave that software with them. Therefore keeping users with bad usability habits in their own little bubble, that being said, Qt developers could join forces to create a proper open source image editing app that makes sense for MOST users.

In my experience, GIMP-hating seems to have a similar lack of specificity to Linux-hating in general. I generally suspect that people underestimate how much Photoshop has them trained.

> Qt developers could join forces to create a proper open source image editing app that makes sense for MOST users.

Do you also believe in vampires and zombies? :)