A single person run project can enforce UX requirements much better than an open source project.

I agree with this. GIMP is powerful and a fine piece of software but it truly needs an enlightened UX despot to come in and clean house.

This seems to be the achilles heal of open-source, the inability to provide even half-decent UX.

"An open source project" can be anything, there are plenty out there which are solo endeavors that don't accept substantial contributions.

But I would agree that the classic model of big, slow-moving, design-by-committee open source projects have mostly yielded mediocre results.

Whenever I see posts like this my immediate reflex is to remind the complainant to have a little respect for the creators. But it’s really hard to disagree with this…

Sorry but the creators have such a disdain for any form user experience enhancements that I cannot give them a pass.

That's been the feeling of many of us for years (literally, when I knew a few of the GIMP folks back in my VA Linux days I rattled off stuff I thought was valuable and some of its still not there...mostly around the baroque UX, 20+ years on).

It's sad because it's not that the app isn't powerful, it's that it's obtuse to anyone but diehards.

I tried to talk and engage in the community for a while, came up with really well researched tried-and-tested UX improvements, only to be dismissed as not “relevant”. Further engagements only seem to be showing how opaque the decision making process is (you can see this in a different form in the wordpress community btw)

You have to keep in mind that for as many non gimp user asking for a change in gimp UI there are as many current gimp users who would not necessarily see it as a good change if it hurts their muscle memory and workflow.

For example when they introduced the single window mode as default, I view it as a regression only because people can't use a window manager properly or pretend to do professional stuff on what is just a glorified video game console OS with a shitty windows management. Thanksfully they kept an option to keep using multiple windows mode for us.

Well, I can understand the position of long time gimp users, but ultimately you have to move on to better paradigms and years of UX research. If you match it with a legacy mode, things can be a smooth transition.

In that time I used GIMP a lot and was a good moderate level user probably, but the interface kept getting in my way (unlike Photoshop were I was able to reach almost a flow state of doing things at that time)

Eventually I just moved on, but I can’t fully shake the feeling that GIMP could have been so much more. Godot and Blender which others mentioned just have done so much better in that regard. Blender had the suckiest of UX/UI but even in the face of much/some “old timer” resistance they made something that most hail as a success now.

Blender has indeed been a much more "slow overnight success" than I suspect GIMP will ever be, and that's unfortunate, because its not like GIMP is lacking in the potential.

I think many of us really wanted it to succeed and tried to love it. Unfortunately, it just isn’t what most people want.

As a GIMP user for 20+ years there’s no way I can defend them.

Ditto Affinity Photo. Even paid programs are abysmal compared to Photopea.

Pixelmator Pro is the only acceptable comparable UI I've found (and performs a lot better than Photoshop).

Really? I heard Affinity Photo was great, though I haven't really used it.

It's pretty great. The whole Affinity suite is.

Photo is great but Designer still lacks fundamental features that users have been asking for many years. I haven't used Publisher.

Oh, I thought the GP meant that Photopea puts Affinity to shame, I see now, thanks.

I've tried GIMP so many times over the years and yeah, it remains miserable to use. I wish it were not so.

Photopea's killer feature is the fact that it, for the most part, directly copies Photoshop's implementations of features. There's no learning curve because it's basically the same. On the other hand, GIMP still doesn't have Smart Objects or Adjustment Layers.

Once upon a time there was a fork called 'gimpshop' that added a PS-like UI to gimp. Clever idea. Warning - the current gimpshop domain hosts some scammer's adware-laden rip-off.

There's a recent alternative called PhotoGIMP that is trying to accomplish the same thing, not sure if it's based on the original GIMPshop.

> On the other hand, GIMP still doesn't have Smart Objects or Adjustment Layers.

Or even a layer palette with a list view that acts like a normal list view with e.g. shift-click to multi-select, like every list view on every platform has had for upwards of two decades by now.

No adjustment layers? That is like photoshop 101. That's pretty embarrassing for GIMP.

I didn't know what those were, but going by https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/adjustment-layers.h...

You can do all the same stuff in the gimp, but it's just a little more laborious (or a lot more laborious if you're used to photoshop already I guess). The gimp lets you easily do all the same transformations, copy and reapply transformations, etc. It seems like the adjustment layer keeps the original image and the transformations to make it easier to repeatedly tinker with those adjustments and reapply them more quickly, though.

Adjustment layers are a key part of a non-destructive editing workflow. Without them, doing professional work like retouching is much more difficult. GIMP's issue is that they don't seem to care about power user workflows.

People develop software for themselves and package it for others. What's wrong on it?

I use Photopea at work precisely because of this. I know how to use Photoshop, but I don't have a license for Photoshop as an engineer, but I do sometimes need it. Photopea fills that role perfectly and it's almost a perfect drop-in replacement.

Krita on the other hand is really great and getting better every day.

I'm all in on Krita and believe it will be the next Blender.

Blender and Krita are model examples of how to run FOSS projects. Excellent software and excellent projects.

Depends what your goal is. For a long time the GIMP people were pretty clear they just wanted to work on it in their spare time for fun. Ton on the other hand always had some very clear and much bigger ideas what he wanted to do with Blender. Is one way "better" or "worse"? I don't think so, it just depends on what your goals are.

When working with big complex applications, learning how to use them is no small investment. It's not a matter of which development methodology better or worse, what matters to me is whether or not I will see a return on my investment.

With Krita, Blender, Inkscape, Love2D, even Kate, I'm confident those time investments will be worth it.

With GIMP and Godot and a few others, I'm not sure.

> With GIMP and Godot and a few others, I'm not sure.

Why?

I unlearnt photoshop 2 decades ago (basically when I stopped being a teenager/young adult downloading pirate copy of softwares I can't afford) and got used to gimp and I never really missed the photoshop.

This is very believable, it is called disruption and is standard in software. Old companies (or projects) will have the legacy of older technology. That 100k LOC ... is a liability too. You have to get your head around it. Many heads. And to change it, you have to work on ... "it". Not what you dream it to be.

He's done a fantastic job. Meanwhile the GIMP still doesn't have a "Save As..." menu item, you have to go through extra steps using "Export". Just a symptom of the attitude the UI projects.

That's the same wth just a different name, what is the problem?

Maybe all the time looking for how to **ing save the first time, plus all the extra time clicking thereafter, plus the times you forget momentarily and take the wrong route again...

>vast amount of contributors over decades

Designed by by committee, through and through. The older I get the more it seem obvious not to do it, but other people keep jumping on to them.

USB, Bluetooth groups are responsible for some of the dumbest tech decisions in 20 years.

Gimp is a great idea but is a non-starter because of the incredibly disturbing name. I've never heard of photopea before today, but I'm sure glad there's a good alternative.

Edit: here’s what gimp means:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gimp

1. Derogatory term for disabled person

2. Insult meaning stupid person

3. Male sex slave

Could they possibly have picked a worse name? “Poor taste” is a huge understatement

So you can't use a software because of its name?

It would be offensive if that word was refering to someone. It doesn't. It refered initially to "General Image Manipulation Program" and now to "Gnu Image Manipulation Program". It is litterally in the front page of the Gimp website. It is an acronym.

Yeah but if there was a program called HITLER, NAZI, CRIPPLE or what have you, even if their names were acronyms, would you really not think twice about using it?

Congrats from reaching godwin point so early. The former 2 are not really the same scale as they refer to real events that occured, an ideology and agenda.

I don't think I would be annoyed by a software called cripple, especially if it also stands for something else through the acronym., I would probably take it as a joke on the potentially beta status of the software at some point in its life. Again it is not targetting anyone in particular, unlike the former 2.

Gimp is a permanent embarrassment of humanity itself. Literally the worst software I have ever used.

Wow, gonna have to completely disagree there

Gimp has been solving the need of users looking for an open source image editing software for decades. It has been used and forked as filmgimp, now cinepaint who has been used in the film industry.

Not really what I'd call an embarassment.

A triumph of mediocrity, re the UI. It's the incumbent so I use it for tasks and have for decades while longing for something else the whole while.

GIMP doesn't have that many contributors; it's hard to estimate the total contributors at a quick glance because so many committers only commit translation updates, but it doesn't seem more than about 20 over a 25-year period that have some serious (non-drive-by) contributions, all active at different times. Just 4 people seem to account for well over 75% (3 of which are no longer active). At the moment it's about 4 people, give or take, who work on it somewhat regularly.

Is the state of GIMP annoying and frustrating? Sure. Is it a failure to more effectively allocate resources to work on a fairly critical piece of software? I think so. But if you look at the technical side of things it's not that clear-cut at all. Remember that back in the day GIMP had to invent their own toolkit (GTK).

Being a webapp is probably an advantage here. What's the big thing for GIMP 3? The port to GTK 3. Does that really add anything for users? Not really, as such. But that kind of stuff is quite a big time-sink and doesn't really add any features. Same with the new build system, wayland support, i18n changes, etc. which doesn't really "do" anything other than keep the thing from bitrotting.

Photopea has had someone work on it full-time for over 5 years; if you put that against the evenings and Sundays that people work on GIMP, and consider all the "plumbing" they had to do that Photopea doesn't have to deal with then the differences in time spent are probably much smaller than you'd might suspect at a glance.

Gimp works really well.

GIMP has a neat feature called "Color To Alpha", which no other editor has (including Adobe Photoshop). I have added it to Photopea two years ago: https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/2205