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Comment by _eht | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been using Gimp non-professionally for almost eight years now and the latest releases this last couple years have made it such a pleasure to use. Great job team.

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Okay, I was just going to comment on how much I enjoy using Gimp, and the stories I've been hearing over the years about bad usability baffle me. I've really only started using it recently, and it's been an absolute joy to use.

I think Gimp has the same problem a lot of FOSS seems to have. They are extremely powerful on the right hands but because open source community doesn’t have that much of an UX designers, they are really unoptimal to use and the learning curve is so steep most people won’t bother

Maybe UX designers value their time better.

I think it's more of a philosophy problem. In FOSS you have the power and will to get things done, so you don't want to be waiting for sketches or in an endless discussion about details with a designer.

Commercial products work on different timelines and have different goals, and ultimately the developers are often not the users so they don't really care one way or other to follow somebody else's design.

Ideally you get somebody who is both a great designer and a coder but those are few (Asesprite comes to mind)

> I think it's more of a philosophy problem.

UX designers want money, and free software projects are rarely a paying gig.

GIMP collaborated with a UX architect between 2005 and 2012. That guy was paying for this stuff to his employees out of his pocket when he was able to.

I mean, everybody wants money in the end. I don't think that making free software is somewhat different from say, hobbyist painting or making unsolicited redesigns on Dribbble. It's just easier to share and useful to a larger audience.

However I think that people are okay with doing stuff for free as long as it is fun. Being your own master is fun, but if you need to collaborate it will quickly become work.

I think that a lot of people were trained on photoshop, and interpret all deviations from the photoshop interface as suboptimal and not intuitive - because for someone who has exclusively used photoshop, they are suboptimal and not intuitive.

For people moving in the other direction, it's photoshop that's not intuitive. I don't want a single-window interface.

I have tried and failed at using both. I guess the topic of advanced image manipulation itself is too complex to allow for a simple, intuitive interface.

I wouldn't mind an entry-level image manipulation system that starts by giving me only a few obvious functions, and lets me grow into more advanced functions as I learn more, but that's probably too much to expect.

On the other hand, serious image manipulation is no doubt a serious skill that requires training that I simply lack. Someone with no programming training failing to grasp Python or Java doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Python or Java.

The thing that gimp is really missing in my opinion is non-destructive effects. I want to be able to toggle stuff on and off, not permanently change the image. When I looked it up it sounded like it was on the roadmap but there were architectural blockers.

In college they taught us Adobe tools. Around the same time I was picking up FLOSS and dual booting Redhat. And GIMP's UI used different terminology and menu nesting. Some of GIMP's choices seemed confusing or redundant.

I've grown more accustomed to GIMP since my job doesn't justify Adobe prices. But it's still quirky to me.

You know, I'm still perplexed that, in Photoshop, you activate all tools from the toolbox except the effin unified transform tool which you need to call from menu (or learn the shortcut, I believe it's Ctrl+T). Photoshop is actually full of weird stuff like that. At my previous job, whenever I pointed that out to our designer, he went, like, 'Yeah, but what do you want? This software is 30 years old'. That's something I don't commonly hear people admitting on interwebz though :)

I think I've worn out the key caps for <Ctrl> and T on many a keyboard because of the utility of that "hidden" tool.

LOL. I can totally believe that!

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