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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the frequent comparisons to Blender at all, to be honest.

I enjoy Blender, but it's a specialist application with a highly complex, mostly unintuitive user interface that requires training and has a steep learning curve.

When people start using Blender, they generally start with a written or video tutorial series and are prepared to put in hours to get productive.

I'm sure Blender's UI is fine for what it does, but it's certainly not any easier to use than e.g. LightWave/Modo/Cinema4D was, and arguably harder.

Are people really saying GIMP is somehow harder than that?

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>I don't understand the frequent comparisons to Blender at all, to be honest.

From the very beginning it was trying to be an alternative to Photoshop, you know a software used by the professional industry, and 30 years later we are not sure it's any closer to that.

Whereas Blender is not just an alternative to Maya, 3DS Max and all the other options but might even be the leading software in its domain

Now imagine the world if the GIMP team had the epiphany the Blender team had a few years ago

What was their epiphany?

Older Blender versions had terrible UX like Gimp does now, their epiphany was realizing that they should fix it.

Blender in the early days before the UI upgrade was like GIMP now: irrationally difficult to use.

Blender is still not beginner-friendly, but that's true of all 3D modeling software. There's a limit to how friendly you can make the UI without making it burdensome to accomplish things.

GIMP is just user-hostile, and deliberately so. GIMP's UI is not laid out logically, nor does its illogical UI make possible any additional functionality. The programming team has made such minimal effort to make the UI better that it's big news when they make even minor UI improvements.

The problem is that there's not just one "user". Tons of people have used GIMP for decades and are use to how it works - so changes to be less "user-hostile" can make it hostile to existing users.

For instance, we were repeatedly told that copy+paste creating a floating selection instead of a new layer was confusing and aggravating for users. So we changed it in 3.0 to make a new layer like other software. While we got praise from some people, we started getting new complaints that we'd broken people's workflow (see https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1vmrza2/it_is_not_str... for a wide range of user feedback as one example)

That doesn't mean we don't try to improve things (obligatory link to our user design feedback site: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...), but making big changes is difficult when you have an existing user base who are using your software successfully as-is.

Consider that the overwhelming majority of this thread on a tech-focused forum have issues with the UI. That should tell you something about how ridiculously illogical the UI is compared to every other program in the space.

GIMP has been catering to the extremely tiny niche of people who "successfully" use its software since at least the Slashdot days. And it's remained a niche product while all of its competitors in the opensource space have grown.

It may not be quite as niche as people think: https://fosstodon.org/@GIMP@floss.social/116674728764606215

To your first point, it's difficult to know people's frame of reference online. I've listened to many complaints on forums, only to find out the person was thinking of older versions of GIMP and it no longer applied (like multi-window mode being default, outlining text being an ordeal, etc). We also see plenty of feedback like https://lemmy.world/post/50729195/25325527, so it's not always easy to figure what's universally illogical.

I'm not deflecting or saying that GIMP's UI is perfect the way it is - there's a lot of improvements I want to make to the non-destructive filter UI alone. But we can see that real people use the software for real work, so we try to keep existing users in mind when making UI improvements since it impacts them and what they do. There's been some well intentioned UI/UX requests I've implemented that ended up breaking a lot of people's workflows, and those still weigh on my soul. :)

(Obligatory plug for our UX tracker if you feel like providing specifics on UI problems you've encountered: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work_it...)

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