Could you give examples of this? I use Gimp non-professionally a few times a week. (Photo development work is done in other apps, including RawTherapee and Lightroom.) I must say that I find GIMP incredibly easy to use, much easier than Photoshop for example (but also much less powerful than Photoshop).

The tools consistently make sense and are where I expect them to be, and I find the menu bar to be well set up. Dividing the different functions into Image / Layer / Colors / Filters makes a lot of sense to me. (I do use the system GTK theme with color icons, which I don't think is the default, but it makes the tools much easier to see for me.)

I'm not doubting that some people have trouble using GIMP but I have no idea what those problems are, because most people aren't specific about what parts of the UI confuse them. I've yet to see a graphics editing program that was at least as powerful as GIMP and less confusing.

I'll give one: How do I add a layer to a picture in gimp? Say I want to overlay a logo onto another image and then just save that resultant image.

In MS Paint, it's like 30 seconds of work: Crtl+A, Crtl+C from one image, make sure that it's a transparent copy, Crtl+V in the other image, wangle-jangle the box to be correctly positioned, save it, done.

In gimp? Good God, it's at least 10 trips to google to figure that out.

I must be misunderstanding what it is you want to do. As a test, I opened two images in GIMP. On the smaller one, I ctrl-c. Tabbing over to the larger one, I ctrl-v. The small image is overlaid in a temporary layer on top of the larger one. I can drag it around with the move tool. At this point if I'm done I can just export it. If I need to do more work I can either flatten it with Layer -> Anchor Layer or make the new layer permanent with Layer -> To New Layer.

I don't see how it could possibly be simpler than that. Even the exact same keyboard shortcuts you used in MS Paint work directly in Gimp with no changes!

Ok, I just tried this in gimp and crtl+C and ctrl+V do not work for me. When I right click on the other window with all the layers listed, it sees that there is another layer in there with another picture, but it will not show up in the resultant image.

I'm going to be honest, I'm not a daily gimp user. Even the terms you've used here (flatten, anchor, export, tabbing over, temporary, move tool, permanent) will require me to google those terms.

I'm sure that the shortcuts that I've used 'work' for you. However they do not 'work' for me. Like, I'm honestly going out of my way here to test this out and trying to follow what you've written there. I'm spending my own time to try this. I know what AWS is, I know Python and pandas fairly well, I've gone to talks by Stallman, etc. I'm not grandma.

And I have no idea what to do here or what you're trying to tell me.

Gimp, for me, a semi-tech-literate person, is gobbly-gook and requires loads of training to get up to speed.

I think any complexity in my explanation is probably inherent to a layers-based graphics program, and probably can't be further reduced. The "tab" part of it works exactly the same as every browser in existence. (Are you using an ancient version of Gimp without tabs or single-window mode? The latest is 2.10.)

I'm also not sure what you're talking about with right-clicking, since the instructions I gave don't require you to click on the image at all.

If ctrl-c on one image, ctrl-v on another doesn't put the first image on top of the second for you, it would probably be helpful to report a bug to the Gimp folks because that's always worked for me and surely ought to work. (Obviously if you're on MacOS or something the key might be different, cmd-c or something.)

To be fair, driving a car is much more complicated, but you learned that. You put in the effort because it's worthwhile and enriches your life.

No, it's exactly as you expect in GIMP: Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. Then either Ctrl+H to merge into the layer below (clicking the anchor on canvas does the same) or Ctrl+Shift+N to create new layer from floating selection. Or use Paste as New Layer, of course.

How hard it is... You tell me :)

A simple Drag and drop works. Otherwise, Edit-Paste as New Layer. Not sure why you needed Google for this. Do you know GIMP has it's own search engine by the way? Just press "/" to search various GIMP functionality by keyword.

These things may work for you, but they do not work for me. I tried dragging and dropping, it does not do anything in my set-up.

Just trying to find the Edit-Paste drop-down is difficult. I need google because I need to find these functions in the GUI. It's not 'clean' or easy to find things like this in the hundreds of options.

I did not know that gimp has a search engine, I will try that the next time I need to fight with gimp. Also, "/" is a non intuitive way to bring up the search functionality. There should be a drop-down menu or something somewhere. Just trying to figure out that "/" is the only way to search is not a good method for getting into the search menus.

It's also available from the menus, of course:

Help > Search and Run a Command /

/ is also a common shortcut to invoke a quick find text entry, for example in web browsers.

I don't feel like it's any worse (or better) than Photoshop usability-wise. Really, given the sheer complexity of that sort of raster image editor, confusion is unfortunately par for the course.

GIMP has been my goto graphics software since the early 2000's and yes, this is true. Several common tasks that Photoshop has baked in or has a plugin for has to be done manually in GIMP. Since 2.10 the plugins have really improved but it still definitely has a steep learning curve compared to Photoshop. Another good open-source alternative is Krita. It has a really good balance between usability and features with a slick, modern UI.

For me the webbrowser tab says "Where to download Paint.NET"