In nearly every program in common use, the open → edit → save workflow Just Works. In some programs (e.g., Word) you might get a dialog extolling the features of the newest proprietary format, but it won't prohibit you from saving as the original format (.doc, .rtf, whatever).
GIMP does. The functionality is completely removed from the Save dialog. You have to somehow know to cancel your save (talk about unintuitive) and go use the Export dialog.
IMO, this was an unforced error. GIMP copied the Photoshop Save workflow mistake, despite it being the minority position, despite GIMP's own history of the UI for that feature, and despite not having any (published) A-B studies.
As a Mac user, I can't recall seeing this behavior anywhere, so I checked all the graphics programs I have here. Affinity Designer, Graphic (formerly iDraw), and Pixelmator all use "Save" to mean the application's native format, and "Export" for other formats. So do Apple's iWork apps. So do Omni's apps.
In fact, I can't find a single program that works the way you say "nearly every program in common use" does it. The Apple Human Interface Guidelines call for a Save/Export split along these lines, too, so it's not just a lone Adobe mistake.
Is that a Windows convention? The GNOME/Gtk+ community has not tended to follow Windows UI conventions.
Affinity Designer isn't an image editor. Consistent with its name and marketing, it is graphic design software.
Obviously I have no objection to GIMP positioning itself as a graphic design program rather than an image manipulation program. However, if that's the direction they wanna go, perhaps they might consider changing their name to something other than "GNU Image Manipulation Program."
Most programs aren't image editors which can export in a variety of formats as well as save in a native, preserving format. How Microsoft Word works has literally nothing to do with how GIMP works.
> GIMP copied the Photoshop Save workflow mistake
Tens of hours of work done on accident?
> despite it being the minority position
Photoshop a minority??
> despite GIMP's own history of the UI for that feature
A previous major version's UI has relevance to a future major version's UI???
> despite it being the minority position
Who is paying for these studies????
Yes, of course.
But at some point in a 20-year development cycle you might want to switch things up, and a major release is the time to do it.
I don't think anyone had a legitimate complaint when Blender completely revamped their UI a few years ago. It was objectively better, and "it's different than what I'm used to" was not a valid complaint.
As such it is most definitely a positive change, even if it does go against my 'muscle' memory of how I used to work it, and cause me to 'doh' more often than I should.