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Comment by emilfihlman | Hacker News Reader

>We thank both Handshake.org and GNOME Foundation for the generous donation and will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting.

I don't like this. The money should be used for paying a developer or a couple to develop full time a central feature, like the UI, not to buy new hardware or organize hackfests.

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How long do you think $100k lasts with two full-time devs exactly?

3 months of a professional UI designer could easily quadruple the usefulness of GIMP for me. The UI, in its current state (I always use this disclaimer and it never changed in like 10 years), is a horrible mess and makes GIMP unusable for most professional work. There is no trend of it getting better. They need to hire someone from the outside, accepting that kick in the butt.

Overhauling the GIMP UI would take way longer than three months of a single UI designer. As an operation, we are talking UI/UX design, implementation, testing, and not to mention having to refactor existing code such that it can actually handle such a radical UI change.

I'd put the (very fuzzy) estimate at something like 2 years of consistent (full time) effort from a team of, say, 5 people. That puts the cost of such a change closer to a million dollars.

Yay, at least someone gets it :)

GIMP is only UI. GEGL is actually doing the job behind it. Rewriting UI would mean to restart the GIMP project from scratch. Not that it would be a bad thing.

What are you basing your opinion on? How much direct understanding do you have of what the Gimp team needs and doesn't?

As someone who uses Photoshop and Krita for painting and animation, I can tell you GIMP is unusable as a painter. The way they allocated this donation does nothing to help me use GIMP. And you don't have to take my word for it: David Revoy, the only professional painter to use open-source software and actively promote GIMP that I know, switched to Krita [1]

[1] https://krita.org/en/item/interview-with-david-revoy/

I don't think anybody doubts that the Gimp's UI needs help - This has been well understood for over 20 years.

To it's credit, the project has, over that time, made some significant improvements to its UI. (Starting the GTK project to replace Lesstif/Motif and adding single-window mode come to mind immediately.)

The question is really this: what is the best way for the project to effectively use this contribution to improve it's product? Knowing what professional UX work costs, it's not surprising to me that they decided to direct this grant to supporting their existing developers and trying to bring in a few more with a Hackathon or two.

Installing GIMP again recently and finding single window mode was a great, great joy.

> The money should be used for paying a developer or a couple to develop full time a central feature, like the UI, not to buy new hardware or organize hackfests.

Using a semi-broken computer definitely makes hacking more fun, doesn't it?

> I don't like this.

Well, it's a good thing that you are not part of the project then.

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