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Comment by TheChaplain | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

> 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.

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