Hacker News Reader

Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

Bear with me and take a breath :)

If you think with a cold head about it, do you believe the frustration came from the fact that Gimp has made actually bad choices about placement and design of its features? (tools, menus, options, etc...)

Or would you say it's just that they took a different path, not worse nor better, just wholly different, and that makes things more confusing for people who are used to, and have the different thing made by Photoshop, ingrained in their minds?

(btw your mention about Krita was very spot-on, because otherwise conversation usually ends up revolving about how Gimp is FOSS and thus they cannot afford having a full time designer working on the best possible UI... but in this case it seems clear that Krita has been better for you, while also being FOSS)

View on HN

As someone who's used gimp for more than 10 years because it covers all my needs without issues, and I can work reasonable efficiently because I've already memorised its UI and quirks...

Yes, the frustration most people have is because Gimp has made actually bad choices about placement and design of its features, not just that they took a different path.

At this point I've got muscle memory for many things, but I still sometimes find myself frustrated about the UI being so bad.

I'm in need of photo/image editing rather rarely. I used to pay for Photoshop years ago but I' was a total beginner with it and since I use it for 15 minutes per month, I can't justify the cost of a monthly subscription.

My needs are rather basic: 1) work related: combine some screenshots, crop some part of them, add arrows and text, add a rectangle here or there, get the pixel value of a specific part of the image etc. 2) personal usage: basic photo tuning (fiddle with contrast/sharpness/color balance) or doing some weird mashups of different pictures (cut out stuff from one image and add to another, add some layers, draw some pixel here, remove some from there..)

I've tried various different free alternatives and while other have their quirks and pros and cons, I can honestly say that gimp is _by far_ the worst in terms of UX. It's not even a single thing that I can point out that's the cause for this. It's a combination of many things. Unintuitive placement of features, simple actions that require a huge number of clicks and steps to complete, extremely slow vs every other app (on a M1 laptop), cumbersome UI controls, unexpected side-effects of performing some UI actions etc. If I would draw the usability of various apps on a graph, then every other app I've tried would be clustered together somewhere at one side of the axis and gimp would be on the other side, alone. The magnitude of the UX clumsiness is just so huge compared to everything else :(

This response is for all people who replied to my GP comment, not only for this one: thanks for sharing your experiences! I'm too in the camp of "15 mins a month" (even less) so I always assumed my struggles with GIMP were caused by mere lack of experience. It's enlightening to see that people consider some design decisions "objectively" bad.

I guess all this means that maybe GIMP should really focus on getting help with this. TBH I'd just try to copy Adobe here. They can and I'm sure have spent thousands just to have people thinking about the best placement for tools and widgets. All that can be leveraged by a FOSS tool and advantage from some of the well thought out decisions made by Adobe's professional designers.

> If you think with a cold head about it, do you believe the frustration came from the fact that Gimp has made actually bad choices about placement and design of its features? (tools, menus, options, etc...)

Not the GP.

GIMP was my first image editor (granted it was almost a decade ago so it might be much better today). And the answer is yes. Yes a thousand times.

Once I switched to CSP+PS (later Krita+PS) it's quite hard to imagine going back to GIMP.

There are some legitimately questionable design decisions in GIMP’s UI.

One of my favorite is the layer palette which contains what looks like a bog standard list/table widget like a user has encountered countless time across desktop platforms and software since the 90s.

That illusion breaks when you try to use it as a bog standard list widget — no, you can’t multi-select with Shift and drag the selection around, GIMP has its own unique process for that for no good reason.

Things like that will cause friction even for users who aren’t coming from Photoshop, being different from established desktop UI conventions.

“ do you believe the frustration came from the fact that Gimp has made actually bad choices about placement and design of its features? (tools, menus, options, etc...)”

Yes, yes absolutely without a doubt because I can use photoshop, photopea, krita, paint.net and maybe Corel if ever use it again without issues. Gimps interface is objectively bad.

I learned photoshop from nothing a lot faster and easier than I learned Gimp. Paths for the same process aside, I think Gino absolutely could learn from photoshop when it comes to making things intuitive. Even if doing the task itself is done differently.

I've been using GIMP for well over a decade, and the UI still deeply frustrating.

When I see what Blender has achieved over that time, I wish GIMP could have done the same.

I not only believe that (and I first used GIMP more than 2 decade agos), I believe that the entire project has a culture that is proud of being crude and inaccessible that is shown most strongly not by their bad UX but the fact that they still haven't changed the awful name.

The entire project gives intense vibes of "we don't care what you think" that have made it the poster child for many of the worst parts of OSS for a long time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com