Comment by trop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trop | Hacker News Reader

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FWIW, here is the recent merged pull requests from darktable:

https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pulls?q=is%3Apr+i...

At the moment, this is about a week's work by eight authors. Others cycle/in out, of course -- this is a spot sample. They range from bugfixes to performance improvements to documentation to translation work. All what one would hope for in a software project headed to its bi-annual release next month.

There are many ways to develop, and it may be a bit cruel to compare a one-man show to a long-term international collaboration. But here are the recently merged pull requests from the software which is posted about in the blog post:

https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/pulls?q=is%3Apr+i...

On the first page, I see about five authors offering PR's over the course of all of 2023 -- a much slower pace of community development.

It appears that Ansel is being developed more by direct commits from its main author. So let's compare the recent commits:

https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/commits/master

Page 1 of Ansel commits is by its mono-author from the last week. Page 2 takes us back to August. Page 3 back to June. I totally understand that good developers need to work carefully and sit on things, then release them in due time.

Here goes for darktable commits:

https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/commits/master

If we take a moment to page back to page 3, one can note that we're back to two weeks ago (rather than June). Steady work by a committed community matters. The log of work done is may be quite worth looking at, rather than incendiary blog posts.

The post is about how that type of organizational structure creates chaos. In this case less commits is likely better. Quality over quantity and all that.

I have used Darktable because it was really the only game in town for editing raw photos on Linux - and I have to agree that if anything, it needs less features, and more work standardizing and simplifying its UI.

You see this all the time, where basically there is no coherent organization, you just get a huge grab-bag of random features slapped together haphazardly. This is exactly what happened to Gimp and actually started to happen to Blender but then they pulled their shit together and it’s kind of a masterpiece now.

So I definitely support their effort, understand their frustration, and while a little more tact might be in order - it’s usually the people with passion about something that end up bringing it to another level.

> Blender but then they pulled their shit together and it’s kind of a masterpiece now.

I would love to read more about that! Do you have a blog post or other insight?

This all started with the release of Blender 2.8 - here are the release notes: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/ and you can see a hacker news post about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20566139

Basically blender had a ton of features but you had to learn all sorts of shortcuts and read endless documentation to even become aware of them.

They decided to really focus on the UI and bring it into a more standardized experience, where people who were not intimately familiar with blender would stand a chance - and overall I think everyone has loved it, even those who used it extensively.

One of the things I really like that they added was workspaces, so you can quickly start in a UI that makes sense for what you want to do. Just the other day I wanted to make an animated intro from an svg image, so I just opened it in the 2d animation workspace and was off to the races. Blenders UI has always been infinitely customizable, but without bundling that capability into a feature that benefits the user, it really just lead to confusion.

2.8 was a huge update for them and they’ve sort of been going all in on that user-centric direction with every subsequent release since then.

The blender team has done amazing work on the ui. But it was not some "complete rewrite to make it more accessible" It was closer to "We have a good UI but it has a reputation for being weird and hard. so make the color scheme darker add a drop down menu and most importantly get rid of the undeserved bad reputation by telling everyone we rewrote the whole thing" That is, it was sort of exactly the same thing as this darktable drama, more marketing than actual change. However in blenders case it was for good as people then gave it a try and discovered thet blenders workflow is actually pretty good.

The specific example you gave was the workspaces. That did not sound correct to me so I checked my 2.3 reference manual(the big book they sold right after going opensource) and it has workspaces. I want to say they were one of the big things added for the 2.0 release But I don't really remember that well and am too lazy to actually try and install old releases to find out.

I don't use a lot of 3d software so I am not a huge authority but sometimes it almost is like the opposite has happened. The commercial 3d editors have been copying some of the features blender introduced. stacked windowing system, single window editing, put all the controls up front instead of hiding them behind menus, modal editing. This is a two way stream of ideas as the various editors copy each others good ideas.

Nobody said it was a complete rewrite - in their announcement they call it a redesign, which is what it needed. It's pretty common for tech industry folks to downplay the importance of UI, but these changes were far more significant than a dark theme and a dropdown.

And sorry I misspoke - I was talking about the new template feature where you go File -> New -> 2d Animation - and it puts you in the preset template for doing 2d animation.

The Workspaces are significantly better as well though - it's worth downloading blender 2.7 and the most recent version of blender and comparing, it honestly is night and day comparing the old UI to the current one.

I have a very dim opinion of open-source UI after GIMP and Darktable, so was shocked at how Blender didn't piss me off at all on first use... and looks great.

There's hope!

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