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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

> I think it's just what you're used to.

If most of the mainstream programs work the same way, there's an age old set of UI/UX axioms for developers of competitor programs:

1. The users aren't wrong, <<you are wrong>>.

2. If you think you aren't wrong, <<you're still most likely wrong>>.

3. And if you still think aren't most likely wrong, <<show me your usability studies>>.

Open source programs basically have 0 usability studies because they don't have money for them, so this argument basically dies at step 4:

4. <<Shut the f** up user, I'm giving this away for free>>.

:-)

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> Open source programs basically have 0 usability studies because they don't have money for them

For a lot of projects it's not even the goal to be usable for random people: it's primarily something by the developers, for the developers. If it also happens to be useful for others: great. If not: that's okay too.

Of course other projects do have larger goals beyond just that.

GIMP developers have given kind of mixed signals over the years about what kind of project this is.

This is an important point. People often say "you need to do X to get a large user base", which is basically "capitalist thinking" where the goal is maximizing profit (via large user base).

But open source projects / devs don't have these incentives, they don't get rich out of a large user base. They often develop for fun, scratching their own itch, fulfilling some specific vision. Having user base is still important (testing, bug reports, ideas, PRs, validation/ego), but I think it's rarely the case that OSS's project's top priority is the largest user base possible.

Sometimes you even get sort of gatekeeping devs preferring a smaller, more advanced (dev) user base, since a larger user base composed of basic users bring more headache (support) in comparison with the benefits (quality code contributions).

> "But open source projects / devs ... don't get rich out of a large user base."

Nah. Usually all they often get from a large user base is the frustration of dealing with entitled users who don't understand the first thing about open source, and who sees the dev as nothing more than their personal "code monkey", there only to make the project an exact clone of some proprietary software that user is familiar with.

Photoshop users are not gimp users though.

You need to listen to you actual user base and make sure the data is representative.

As a Gimp user, I sure think that there is some stuff could be improved but "make it more like Photoshop" is not what I need.

See, that's the thing. People dismiss this as being "just Photoshop users". No, it's not, people listed Corel, Krita and 3-4 other photo editing programs here. And those are probably used by 95% of people editing photos.

So Gimp's user base, while existing, is minuscule.

Your is the other common defense, the Emacs defense. "What about the existing users?" (All 4 of them? :-p)

Yes, even the worst programs in the history of mankind (not saying Gimp is horrible, just going for reduction ad absurdum) have their loyal users. That doesn't make them right.

This argument is flawed, in my opinion.

Gimp receives a lot of TLC from its developers. That TLC would help more people if it were better guided in the UI/UX department. My 2 eurocents.

At the end of the day, the Gimp devs can do whatever they want.

But my bet is on this discussion happening in much the same form in 2050.

> "If majority is always right - let's eat shit... millions of flies can't be wrong" - Waldemar Łysiak

Measuring software quality based on number of users is such an insane take. Just imagine applying that to other fields. So Pop music charts represent the peak of musical artistry now? When deciding what laptop you gonna buy you google "Most sold laptop" or what? The most healthy food is the one most eaten?

People are different. They have different needs, different experience levels, different cultural backgrounds and so much more. There is not that one piece of software that is best for everyone.

If a piece of software does not work for you, that is fine. Not everything needs to be for you. For someone else it might be exactly the tool they need.

I absolutely get why people dislike using Gimp but I don't get why that means it needs to change for them. Like for me, yeah Gimp annoys me sometimes but we get along, other photo editing programs annoy me more.

You might not get much value out of Emacs but even if it is just the best tool ever for four people that is still pretty nice. (Honestly, there are dozens of us, dozens!)

There is a point where measuring the user base has merit.

If I wanted a laptop I would certainly buy the laptop bought by most people with the same needs.

For tools like gimp a large user base is beneficial since people wanting to learn how to do photo editing of graphic design will google how to do that and the tools used make a difference, if the majority of users are using Photoshop and Illustrator unfortunately most of thr tutorials and courses will be tought using that and the industry will continue using it.

If however your UI/UX isn't abysmal and you can effectively teach first principles using Gimp, courses and tutorials will come and so will the users.

There's a reason blender became as popular as it is, it was good enough in the beginning and with more users came more funding and more/better developers and now it wouldn't surprise me if it's the preffered tool in the industry.

I’m a Photoshop user who also runs Gimp (I typically use Linux but have a Windows partition and a Mac laptop). Gimp is totally fine for miscellaneous day-to-day basic stuff, but if I’m going to settle in and do any serious image work for more than 15m I’m switching to PS every time. There’s just enough friction in the Gimp interface that I feel more focused using Photoshop, and at this point I’m pretty confident it’s not a question of familiarity, as I’ve used both regularly for years.

You forgot a favorite reply to criticism of open source projects, namely "If you don't like it, fix it yourself, here's the code." In the past I felt that daring to criticise Gimp was equivalent to criticising the idea of Open Source itself.

Ah, that one, too. Sometimes even if you're:

A. A developer

B. That is familiar with the software stack used by the application

C. Has enough time and energy to investigate the root cause of the bug or a proper design for the feature

D. Has enough time and energy to design the fix/feature, implement it properly, write tests, jump through all the hoops

E. Send the pull request

... sometimes the PR still languishes for years or the nightmare scenario, is discarded during a big rewrite that doesn't actually cover this requirement...

So even the code being out there isn't a silver bullet.

Sometimes people really do that. There is a "UI reskinned" Blender fork called Bforartists.

Whether it's a good idea is debatable.

Sending a PR is the easier part of development, the real work is maintaing that code over the years / decades.

Connected to this is the fact that many PRs are kind of misaligned with the project vision, that's at least the main reason I'm rejecting PRs.

Then don't just send a PR: maintain your own fork.

I think that's the bigger part of open source. You can fork it, change it to your needs, and not give a damn what anyone else thinks about your changes.

Oh, that other open source trope, I should publish a book.

Because maintaining an entire fork of any non trivial software is... trivial :-)

Let's just admit that these are complex problems and frankly after watching the hype for almost 20 years, open source proved to be an alternative and a good refuge for many things but on the end user side the early hype until 2008 or so was 80% wrong.

If you truly believe it to be trivial, you should just do it rather than complain.

If you don't, then you can't justify putting more work onto the maintainers of upstream for changes they may not even care about.

Are we still talking about Photoshop where the combined transformation tool is absent from the toolbox and needs to be called from the main menu instead?

Uppercase is strongly discouraged at HN, suggest you switch to italics.

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