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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

> GIMP is pretty darn good

GIMP could be pretty darn good if they gave 20 UX designers another 10 years to redo their entire UX. As is, it's a usability nightmare. Whenever I'm forced to use it, it feels like I spend 70% of my time fighting with the horrible UI, 25% of the time Googling how to do trivial things because it's very much not obvious, and 5% doing what I actually want.

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That's exactly what made Krita so good. Every once in a while they'd shut a bunch of the developers in a room with a bunch of artists/users, have the users complain about everything that pisses them off, and get all those things fixed. The resulting application is obviously driven by what artists enjoy, and it feels that way. Strongly recommended.

The stupid pandemic has made that impossible for us for quite some time, but our current workflow of having artists discuss stuff on krita-artists.org with developers listening, then making a plan and then working on works quite well for us.

But I miss the sessions where each artist present would have two hours to demo making something with the express message: tell us what you hate, and we're not allowed to tell you "oh, but you could do this using that."

Most open source productivity apps are like this.

Free office apps are a great achievement but you seem to get what you pay for.

I find Inkscape pretty good, and remember even preferring it over Illustrator. Certainly depends on the use case though, I wasn't doing anything super complex.

I tried to use GIMP for a few months because I'm totally broke, but I have to agree with the comment here. I ended up getting the full Adobe cloud plan for $30 a month on Black Friday and it's not a bad deal considering I regularly use Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere.

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