Hacker News Reader

Comment by Matl | Hacker News Reader

While all the comments about GIMP needing a total UX overhaul etc. are likely valid, it's worth noting that there's something like 2 people working on the bulk of GIMP at the moment.

It's not a startup that has just raised a series A and opened a flashy San Francisco office.

All that is to say that I don't think the problem is the GIMP devs not knowing what the problems are and needing them explained over and over again.

The problem is a shortage of developers to address them.

So if you can, contribute.

View on HN

I guess i am not the only one who actually likes that Gimp is the same software I got used to many years ago just a lot better.

No need to relearn anytime I have to edit something.

I think there is room for both approaches. Like it or not, photoshop/adobe is the defacto standard everything else is measured from. A compatibility layer like Inkscape does for illustrator has for PS-like behavior is welcome to bring “industry” users in the fold.

My primary use case for gimp is using path and selection tools for removing backgrounds and the UI and shortcuts in gimp are painful coming from a decade of adobe use.

As an outsider, trying to make some UI/UX changes in old open source projects is often extremely energy consuming and difficult. You have to convince all the old hands, who feel it's their project (maybe rightfully so) that the changes are good for new users. Old users will mostly fight any change (don't want to relearn). Many discussions end with "maybe let's make this a setting?". This leads to crappy software with bad defaults, way too many options and nobody will ever use the new settings.

Even though I have a background in UX design, I'm not cut out for this kind of open source work. I've tried.

LibreOffice did a great job of transitioning to an alternative UX and went further to implement not just ribbons but different combinations classic menu with ribbons.

That's the answer IMO, yeah now there's two UX to maintain but it's a step forward.

Another outsider, but Krita seem to be doing really well keeping their UX up to date. To the point where I often use it for a lot of stuff meant to be done by GIMP

> The problem is a shortage of developers to address them.

> So if you can, contribute.

Well, that requires knowledge of C. That already excludes like 98% of the user base or so, or perhaps 90%.

Also, even aside from this, if a majority wants feature xyz but you don't like that, what can you do? It is a constant time investment to convince a majority that what they want may not be great.

You make it sound as if the only bottleneck is lack of developers. I think there are many more bottlenecks than merely lack of developers.

Agreed, I think the bottlenecks are often the gate keepers already in the community. In fact one of the other replies to the parent indicates that mentality. Where they are happy that GIMP has remained unchanged and are happy with the UI. This is exactly the kind of sentiment that often makes progress become stagnant. The small vocal community gets used to things like poor UI, and then turns into a NIMBY about any changes that would benefit the masses (but require them learning new things).

Unfortunately I think this is why most of the time you don't see progress in applications like this until there is a fork or a whole new application. Especially with AI based development now, I think the problem is often not the lacking people to make code, but lacking people that allow the code to be contributed in the first place.

After the attitude displayed by those developers towards e.g. opening jpegs and saving GIMP format files, I don’t think I’m interested in contributing and have replaced using GIMP with Paint.Net and Corel.

I feel like people working on things for free can be cut a little bit of slack and not always be policed about any random person not linking their 'attitude' for some comment on a PR they made or whatnot.

But I guess it's easier to come up with reasons for not contributing than actually contributing.

like the ffmpeg teams said "Send Patches"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com