for starters, toolbox grouping and icon theme changes are reversible in settings, and in fact the "legacy" icons have gotten a lot of love in 3.0. they look nice at high dpi now! (it's a shame we moved away from the tango aesthetic in linux land too early because god the style can look so right and crisp on hires screens)

having used all the 3.0 RCs up till now, i can assure you all gtk3 has done is made life nicer on all major platforms. for gimp's faults (now markedly fewer) it's an image editor, a thing with a distinct purpose and pretty immediate feedback on indulgent changes nuking productivity. the cancerous low-information-density, look-over-feel trends that we associate with new gtk versions by way of gnome's visionless bikeshedding blessedly does not translate to this new gimp. pinky promise. go use it. you'll like it.

Yeah, I don't buy this "we just hid the nice way behind an option" explaination, I've been stung by that too many times to ignore it..

It means "this gonna get dead" and the argument will be "oh, nobody uses it" yeah, because, you can only want a nice thing back if you knew it existed to begin with, eventually, most users either never knew it was there, or assumed it went away, and eventually, forget it entirely, and then it's gone.

Open Gimp's settings dialog.

I don't think you have to worry about settings disappearing in newer releases.

Which, major releases of Gimp are so slow anyways, if it was a realistic worry for this software specifically (it's not), it would probably be 10+ years before such a change hit stable.

It's the blind assumption that if a UI was developed in the last year it is "Modern" and therefore automatically better. I guess there will be a phase of AI infused UI design to drag things further downhill. The equiavalent of a car saying: "We've noticed that you mainly use the Gas pedal, so we've made it bigger and put it right in the middle for you. Enjoy!". I am, of course, old and stuck in my ways ;-)

That is a fantastic analogy with modern UI design.

It’s a race to the bottom to simplify the most common use case for the most incompetent computer user.

To compound things, because everything is “engagement” driven, it means you have product managers place entirely unwanted features in prime real estate locations, often in jarring ways like with full colour animations, just to get people to use it. (Eg pretty much every AI feature in productivity tools).

Can only agree. The common toolbar plus extensive menus were the best and most accessible.

Office 2003 were amazing in this regard, you could customize the toolbars as you needed to optimize your workflow.

> putting multiple icons under the same button and then changing the icons too to make it entirely impossible to find anything

This also annoys me to no end. Here is how to fix the icons:

Ungroup GIMP tool icons:

    Edit -> Preferences -> Interface -> Toolbox -> Untoggle "Use tool groups"

Restore old icons with color:

    Edit -> Preferences -> Interface -> Icon Theme -> Select "Legacy"

And while we are at it, here are a few more quality-of-live improvements:

- Pressing '/' opens a search dialog for all tools.

- By default, the brush size selector precision is garbage. You can get fine precision by using '[' or ']' keys, mouse wheel or right click + drag instead of left click + drag.

GIMP can do most things, but it is unfortunately a good example of how sane defaults are important.

That being said, I've tried version 3 and did not notice a large difference in UI except that everything is a darker shade of gray: https://i.imgur.com/Lj5BIA2.png

    sudo snap install gimp --channel=preview/stable
    /snap/bin/gimp

Just FYI, changing icons/themes/tool groups is even simpler in 3.0. In the Welcome Dialogue that pops up on start, you can change all those settings in the Personalize tab.

You can also access that dialogue under Help.

I don't mind black and white icons in most places, but in GIMP and Inkscape I turn on colour icons - there are lots of icons together in a palette and it's hard to tell which is which.

Monochrome icons is from GNOME, it's a shame Sun has gone, they used to do usability testing on GNOME and publish the results .

Read this further, yeah there won't have been a big difference in UI, I think its been such a push to get this out.

We'll see how it goes from here, while it should be easier under Gtk3, there's still a bunch of UI to make sane around d GEGL ops etc.

I wonder if we will see a push to Gt4, that should be less painful than 2 to 3.

We should see improvements gradually accelerate now this is out.

> putting multiple icons under the same button and then changing the icons too to make it entirely impossible to find anything

GIMP's toolbox was like that, since forever IIRC, no?

Edit: Just checked, everything is where it's since 1998. New tools added under correct toolbox categories (heal under stamp/clone, etc.).

They are there own damn icons! And they should be! They always were. It's now an option that you need to enable.