Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

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Inkscape, GIMP, and Blender (haven’t tried since it’s 2.X release, but since this was true for decades, just roll with it) - have long had one thing in common that completely ruins any chance of seriously using the software for anything meaningful, for many; many people - and that - of course - is the UI/UX.

And I will deflect immediately the ‘well if you don’t like it, contribute’ to state - I’ve actually tried, in the past. I was involved with the GIMP coding community for a while post high school, because I actually do know that under this awful, counter-intuitive and ugly as all living hell software, there is actually great image rendering and editing code under there.

I’m not sure if it’s changed, I really hope it has - because it majorly turned me off of contributing to FOSS projects since - but the community was extremely hostile, at least to me - and; more importantly - nobody seemed to care about the work I was doing or wanted to do with regards to overhauling the UI/UX. It clearly wasn’t a priority for the rest of the team.

We need a dedicated team of 3-4 people to overhaul the awful useless mess of a UI/UX that a lot of these FOSS creative apps have - and it just never seems to come together, so the apps never get to a usable state in their UI/UX, so they never get as many people using them as they need to, so they never grow enough to find the team they need to in order to fix it.

I’ve been following this shit for 20 years, and at this point I’ve just given up on GIMP/Inkscape.

Unfortunately these particular projects seem to be run by people who just do not prioritize these things. I know just as well as the next back end coder that the functionality matters most. But this ‘function over form’ mentality for 20 years - in GIMP’s case - has led to one very ugly and counter-intuitive piece of software that could literally rival Photoshop if only it the team could change its mentality/philosophy a bit.

I’ve considered forking it to make something ‘usable’, but the thing is, I’d like to really help with the issue in the main app itself!

> but the community was extremely hostile, [...] nobody seemed to care about [...] overhauling the UI/UX

You realise that coming in new and wanting to immediately overhaul the UI/UX is not a sociable thing to do, right? In fact, people new to a project suggesting a huge overhaul is generally a red flag for their understanding of the project or their likelihood of being a good-faith contributor.

I do agree that the UI/UX of several tools needs an overhaul. Given the history of such efforts across many open source projects, it seems likely that a fork is the only way to pull that off. You'd need a talented UI (and fixup dev) team to make it worthwhile.

New contributors are actually in a much better position to judge UI/UX because they are not used to all the idiosyncrasies of the software yet.

I have used Gimp regularly and still like it, but it is... different, and not in a good way.

The fiasco that is exporting / saving for example, clearly shows that core developers don't care about users much. Which is fine, but it is a shame. I have stopped recommending Gimp some time ago.

>> You realise that coming in new and wanting to immediately overhaul the UI/UX is not a sociable thing to do, right?

You realize it needs to be done, right? :/ You realize this attitude is likely what prevents it getting done?

I’m sure I’m not the first person to go through that experience, and; again - this needs to happen in the actual build, not a fork.

Sounds like a great idea to create a UI/UX fork of Gimp, I would love to use it or even contribute. Not sure if you can build a community around it, but if you succeed, either your fork leads the way, or core Gimp ups their game - both of which are great options.

It's not about my attitude but about yours - I'm talking about the way social structures work in most cases. If you aren't willing to prove you can cooperate with a group, why would the group be willing to cooperate with you?

Stepping in with a replace-the-whole-UI idea is generally combative in nature and may engender combative responses. Rather than being surprised at the response, maybe think about whether what you did might cause it.

By odd analogy, it's like you're starting a career as a traffic engineer and immediately demanding the road surfaces get replaced, without demonstrating an understanding of why the road surface is the way it is or why projects to replace the road surface tend to fail.

(I'm not involved with the project, so my attitude doesn't matter and you don't need to worry about what I think.)

Inkscape has had the same basic UI for about a decade. I just upgraded this week on my machines to 1.1.2 after using 0.96 for a long while, and I felt at home still. Inkscape's UI hasn't changed much because there's really no other UI for SVG stuff. Look at Adobe Illustrator and you'll see that modulo some very small differences, there's a lot of the same UI in the same place or nearly the same place.

What has seriously improved in Inkscape over the last decade is definitely performance. Every release, I see major perf improvements.

Blender and GIMP have both had major UI overhauls, but Blender has seen the largest. in 2019, Blender threw out their old UI and built a whole fresh one for 2.80. 2.80's UI absolutely brought it up to the same par that a lot of professional tools are at now.

I will also mention that Blender is being used __In Industry__. In 2019, Ubisoft began tossing money into the funding pool & is using it internally for their animation: https://www.blender.org/press/ubisoft-joins-blender-developm... & there's a few places it's been confirmed to be in use over in the Techways course on blender: https://techways.online/courses/blender/lessons/blender-basi...

But to your point about community: Something I had to learn long ago was that all projects, open source or not, push against "Change for Change's Sake." Several attempts had been made at updating Blender's overall look and feel but with mixed reception, even from within.

The best way to get something done in any part of a well established ecosystem is to rally some friends, get a good proof of concept working, and present it. This is how three major changes in Linux have been done: Lennart Poettering, as much as you might disagree with him, stood up and said "Sound on linux sucks because you have to do a bunch of ioctl shit. Let's make a good API and a sound server to go along with it so you get all the advantages of modern audio routing". He then stood up again and said "you know what, sysV init sucks too, let's make something that handles the configuration for the vast majority of the peripherals on a system and the services that depend on those peripherals."

The fact of the matter is that most Open Source is maintained in the spare time between meetings and shifts flipping burgers:

* Lots of FOSS projects are one person maintained, in their spare time, more and more by people working dead end hourly jobs like retail. Seriously. * The big ones out of companies are probably maintained by zero people full time.

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