I'm scared, they already started messing with the toolbox stuff (putting multiple icons under the same button and then changing the icons too to make it entirely impossible to find anything).. "modern desktop" has taken on a different meaning for me, it's all about making it look neat at first glance, then entirely undiscoverable, removing any affordance in sight, burger menus, ribbon menus.. f...
having used all the 3.0 RCs up till now, i can assure you all gtk3 has done is made life nicer on all major platforms. for gimp's faults (now markedly fewer) it's an image editor, a thing with a distinct purpose and pretty immediate feedback on indulgent changes nuking productivity. the cancerous low-information-density, look-over-feel trends that we associate with new gtk versions by way of gnome's visionless bikeshedding blessedly does not translate to this new gimp. pinky promise. go use it. you'll like it.
It means "this gonna get dead" and the argument will be "oh, nobody uses it" yeah, because, you can only want a nice thing back if you knew it existed to begin with, eventually, most users either never knew it was there, or assumed it went away, and eventually, forget it entirely, and then it's gone.
I don't think you have to worry about settings disappearing in newer releases.
Which, major releases of Gimp are so slow anyways, if it was a realistic worry for this software specifically (it's not), it would probably be 10+ years before such a change hit stable.
It’s a race to the bottom to simplify the most common use case for the most incompetent computer user.
To compound things, because everything is “engagement” driven, it means you have product managers place entirely unwanted features in prime real estate locations, often in jarring ways like with full colour animations, just to get people to use it. (Eg pretty much every AI feature in productivity tools).
This also annoys me to no end. Here is how to fix the icons:
Ungroup GIMP tool icons:
Edit -> Preferences -> Interface -> Toolbox -> Untoggle "Use tool groups"
Edit -> Preferences -> Interface -> Icon Theme -> Select "Legacy"
- Pressing '/' opens a search dialog for all tools.
- By default, the brush size selector precision is garbage. You can get fine precision by using '[' or ']' keys, mouse wheel or right click + drag instead of left click + drag.
GIMP can do most things, but it is unfortunately a good example of how sane defaults are important.
That being said, I've tried version 3 and did not notice a large difference in UI except that everything is a darker shade of gray: https://i.imgur.com/Lj5BIA2.png
sudo snap install gimp --channel=preview/stable
/snap/bin/gimpMonochrome icons is from GNOME, it's a shame Sun has gone, they used to do usability testing on GNOME and publish the results .
We'll see how it goes from here, while it should be easier under Gtk3, there's still a bunch of UI to make sane around d GEGL ops etc.
I wonder if we will see a push to Gt4, that should be less painful than 2 to 3.
We should see improvements gradually accelerate now this is out.
You can also access that dialogue under Help.
GIMP's toolbox was like that, since forever IIRC, no?
Edit: Just checked, everything is where it's since 1998. New tools added under correct toolbox categories (heal under stamp/clone, etc.).
Office 2003 were amazing in this regard, you could customize the toolbars as you needed to optimize your workflow.