Hacker News Reader

Comment by lightwords | Hacker News Reader

You know what? The hate GIMP gets in the comments is entirely self-inflicted. Everyone praises Krita and Blender because their UIs are consistent and look good. GIMP, on the other hand, looks like a toddler worked on it: switches are huge compared to text, buttons and text have no padding and are squeezed together, and icons are oversized and scattered everywhere.

People might say, "You can just join the project and fix it yourself." But the team and community actively resist change and sabotage efforts to make GIMP more mainstream.

View on HN

I once tried to use GIMP and gave up after 2 hours and got the task done in figma in 10 minutes. GIMP is a UX atrocity. The interface is a cluttered mess of meaningless panels and buttons. Worst for me is i'd spend 15 mins googling/reading how to do something, look for the corresponding buttons for 10 minutes, be unable to find them, and later discover they were on a panel that wasn't enabled by default (I didn't even know you had to enable panels; i'd assumed everything that was available was there in front of me). On macOS some panels randomly disappear behind other programs.

It was like using a computer program in your dreams where things don't really have to make sense.

My theory is this is a classic OSS problem where everyone wants to contribute their pet feature but the project lacks discipline and nobody wants to remove, organise, and improve (especially where the latter can be 10x harder and more tedious then the former). This could be an argument for opinionated leaders in OSS projects, because at least they'll say 'no' and do things 'their' way a lot of the time, which is often better than the 'anything goes' philosophy.

> I once tried to use GIMP and gave up after 2 hours and got the task done in figma in 10 minutes.

You would have been just as lost, if not more, in Photoshop (if you had never used it before.) You were doing a simple job that should have been done in a simple program.

GIMP still lags behind the photoshop I used in the late 90s/early 2000s. Then there is the name thing. I am *NOT* telling anyone else how to feel about it. I have no interest in relitigating it, but I am disabled and had it thrown at me as a term of hate; I just can't support a piece of software that uses it. We each have to stand up for what matters to us.

Friendly reminder to everyone that https://photopea.com exists. If you are used to Photoshop, then the UI will be quite familiar.

I only need to do somewhat basic stuff these days, so photopea.com is more than enough for me. However, now that I look it has tons of new features. Nothing to install, is ad-sponsored by default, and runs entirely client-side.

IIRC, this is a lone developer, who has previously refused what seemed like lucrative catch & kill acquisition offers.

Here is a post with lots of info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33334521

It is an impressive piece of software, and there are lots of other low(er) cost alternatives to Photoshop; but I think the broad appeal of GIMP is that it it is free in the GPL sense of freedom, not just as in beer and that can't be ignored in any discussion of the software. Also the fact that you can use it fully offline

My favorite part about Photopea is it is a PWA so you can use it offline as well

It's been like this forever. Always been "photoshop but harder to use".

We actually have a design site where we ask for user feedback and UX/UI improvement suggestions: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...

I share this link a lot in the hopes that more people take us up on it, and provide specifics on where problem areas are for their workflow. So many people use GIMP in so many different ways, even something that seems "obviously bad" to one group might not be encountered by others.

Thoughts on posting a UX and/or workflow related Issue under Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux that would pretty much just recite an existing Issue from GNOME/gimp?

One of our contributors does a lot of upkeep work, and he normally ports UX-related issues from the code tracker to the UX repo. Not 100% perfect, but it helps keep the focus in the right spot.

Am I reading this right in that I should avoid doing it myself then?

If you think it's UX related concern, then I'd recommend posting it on the UX tracker first. But even if it's posted in the "wrong place", it'll likely be moved to the right one after it's looked at, if that makes sense?

However, if you see an older issue that could use some UX design discussion, feel free to suggest it be moved.

Alright, got it. Thanks

Why not add a "Photoshop" theme? You select it in some option or on install, and it turns into something looking like Photoshop.

We're working on an extension platform, and once that's up and running we'll probably reach out to PhotoGIMP developers (https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp) and see if they want to host it there.

Then people can easily download and install it directly in GIMP, hopefully making everyone happy.

From tfa

> A lot of new and existing contributors have submitted improvements to GIMP’s user interface and its user experience. We wanted to highlight their efforts, and encourage you all to continue sharing your feedback on our design issue tracker.

I see no active resistance. If you have feedback, maybe share it with them?

Between GIMP releases we saw entire graphics pipelines, conventions and workflows come and go. We had the Affinity suite, Canva, Paint.net, Clip Paint Studio, Sketch, various attempts from Adobe at expanding beyond the Photoshop ecosystem (Anyone remembers XD?), probably something else I’m missing right now. Now we’re in the age of Figma, with its own UI and quirks.

At this point it’s probably easier to accept that the GIMP UI is simply what GIMP developers want it to be.

True, it doesn’t make a lick of sense, but the same could be said about Turbotax, Jira, SAP… or God may have mercy on your soul, Avid Pro Tools.

It is what it is. It’s not like there are no alternatives anymore.

It could also be that the Gimp team and community wants their software a certain way, and I don't see why one should disrespect that?

Those who disagree are welcome to fork- and maintain it, if the users see value in it, they'll switch.

It could be that the Gimp team and community are so self-selecting, defensive, and idiosyncratic that they drive everyone else who wants to change (read as "improve") it out of the team and community before letting them do anything to fix it. Gimp stands out among applications I've used as having enduring bad UX for decades, and it's hard to imagine a reason for it other than that efforts to improve it are unwelcome. Even Blender, which I once thought was the only thing worse than Gimp, has successfully turned that around. The reputation that Gimp has for its poor UX is not a random coincidence that a cursed meteor struck it of all open source projects, it's an enduring social problem with exactly that team and community that has earned it that reputation. This enduring social problem won't be fixed by this attitude of "we want it a certain way", that's just defensiveness displacing the critical thinking that was actually needed all along.

The suggestion to fork it is in bad faith. A fork goes nowhere unless a critical mass of the development community goes with it, and if you've already driven away the critical mass that could sustain a fork, that can never happen. Don't worry, Gimp is safe, I don't think anyone organized enough to fix its problems thinks it's worth the effort anymore, they're all working on other things instead.

It's just sad. Nobody wants to fork it because nobody uses GIMP, so forks get almost no traction. People love the effort and commitment, install it, try it for a couple of tasks, fail, and never come back. It has built up this reputation of being terrible, and no one wants to give it a second chance after their first impression.

I think it's a lesson in how not to run an open-source project. I put it in the same category as Darktable, which gives off that exact same bad first impression.

> People love the effort and commitment, install it, try it for a couple of tasks, fail, and never come back.

If you just tried Photoshop 2 or 3 times, you'd fail to get anything accomplished either. GIMP is a Photoshop replacement, not an MS Paint replacement.

Maybe the problem is that not everyone needs Photoshop, or to learn a tool at all, and GIMP comes as standard on every Linux install. Most people never have a need for it. They only need MS Paint (or rather Paint.NET or Krita.)

Thinking that you should be able to just roll in and immediately get stuff accomplished on Photoshop or GIMP is a misjudgment of the skill it takes to use professional tools.

GIMP's UI is fantastic, and its capabilities are incredible.

edit: another problem is that people make a living from using Photoshop because it's an industry standard, so they're motivated to learn it. For GIMP you had to take the same effort to learn something that you couldn't use professionally. Hopefully the improvements on color and non-destructive editing will improve the situation on that front. It's becoming something that, if I have the latitude, I can use on the job at a print shop.

If you just tried Photoshop 2 or 3 times, you'd fail to get anything accomplished either.

This is is simply not true. Photoshop is popular even with non-tech users because it is possible to do things in Photoshop without having to figure out an illogical UI.

? people take literal classes to learn Photoshop. I took a course at a rec center in high school in the 2000s and it had a bunch of adults learning it for work.

In the early 2000s, people were taking classes to learn how to use Word. Now even grandma uses Word without thinking about it.

We're talking about 2026. GIMP had an excuse for its UI back in 1999. It doesn't anymore.

Word is both simpler and more widespread. Also you'd be surprised. My boomer parents are not Word wizards lol.

PS isn't that much simpler or more intuitive now than back then. It's an inherently more complicated tool.

darktable is at least slowly actually getting better... I like what blender managed to do.

The attitude partly affects GNOME too, any time you'd constructively criticize it on places like their Issue tracker or r/gnome, their defenders would come with pitchforks at you. Glad I moved to KDE nearly a decade ago.

Gnome does UX and UI very well, though.

I honestly think a lot of the hate that GIMP gets is because as the first major FOSS image editor, people tried to use it for everything with a lot of square hole round peg situations.

In particular, it’s a photo editor at core. You can use it for postprocessing of other image types if you want, or for pasting together memes or whatever. But it’s not designed for e.g. doing illustrations or digital painting or sketches

This isn’t even unique to GIMP in that way. Photoshop is also a sub par art program (though admittedly they’re a little more flexible than GIMP). But if you wanted something better for than Photoshop and were ok with proprietary windows/mac software there’s clip studio paint and before that there was paint tool sai etc.

While until the rise of Krita being actually good (having tried it many times over the years prior, that’s some time around 2018) if you wanted Linux or just wanted FOSS, you had to use Gimp and that breed resentment at it being the wrong tool

Finally, specific criticisms that aren’t “it’s not Photoshop!”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com