Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

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Inkscape is one of the best examples of open source done well (make sure to use the latest version if your distribution bundles an old one); even when I still had (pirated) versions of Adobe I preferred Inkscape over the Adobe offerings.

Audacity is another great program from experience, and the success of Blender speaks for itself.

Gimp, on the other hand, is a UX nightmare. There's a tutorial on how to draw a line, and you'll need it, because it requires a non-discoverable keyboard shortcut. Its feature set is either ages behind Photoshop, or there but non-discoverable due to bad UX, and the UX makes basic tasks excruciatingly painful.

Photoshop and IrfanView are the two tools I miss most from Windows, the latter even more than the former. Trivial tasks like "crop picture in clipboard and put it back on the clipboard/into a file" are pure pain on Linux, because the only thing that at least works reliably is Gimp with its horrible UX. One of the "lighter" (Paint.NET equivalent) tools left parts of its UI in my saved image. Others don't support the clipboard. IrfanView with Wine just isn't the same either.

> Gimp, on the other hand, is a UX nightmare.

I always wondered about Gimp. I use it all the time, but for VERY basic things. But anytime I want to do ANYTHING, even like just add a word to an image or draw a line, I need to go Google how to do it. The newest version seems better, but the UX is just crazy.

I'm starting to think GIMP's problem is that it is too similar to Photoshop. People open GIMP, see a different dialog for the exactly same thing in Photoshop and go "this UX is a nightmare". They don't approach it as a new piece of software that they have to learn how to use effectively.

As a counterexample to all the GIMP bashing in this thread, I'm using it extensively, don't find its interface crazy and in rare occasions that I use Photoshop or PaintShop Pro I find that my experience in GIMP translates reasonably well.

I have never, ever used Photoshop, and have used Gimp since one of its earliest versions (but not frequently) and I'd still pull out Gimp as the textbook example of a non-intuitive UI with poor discoverability. It's gotten better, but it took many years for it to add the hint of pressing shift to draw lines, for example.

The point is that a paint application is not something most of us expect to have to spend time learning how to use effectively for the most basic features, because conceptually painting is very simple.

A lot of people expect the simplicity to be the default, and for the complexity to build from that.

A very simple way of making Gimp far more approachable would be to have a "basic" toolbar with a simplified sets of tools and dedicated tools for things like drawing a line, and ask on first startup if you want the basic toolbar or "advanced" toolbars, and tell you how to access additional toolbars.

But there are many other warts as well, such as the Save vs. Export distinction which gives you an error and tells you to use Export if you try to Save with another extension, instead of just bringing up the export options and maybe warning on the first go. 90% of the time when I use Gimp, I have no interest in saving as xcf, and I'd expect that to be the case for a lot of users. Yes, I understand it's worth warning users if they risk losing information, but to then instead telling people effectively "I can see what you're trying to do - it's very obvious, so I'll tell you how to do it instead of doing it" is just annoying.

I've only used Photoshop very rarely but always disliked its UI. On the other hand i used PSP since the Win3.1 days up until PSP7 and then switched to GIMP which i used for 15+ years.

I never really had an issue on doing anything with GIMP, but in terms of UX i vastly prefer PSP7 which IMO is the last good version of PSP. After many years of using GIMP alone, i reinstalled PSP7 on my PC and i immediately felt much better using it than GIMP (even though GIMP is better on a technical level - faster filters, better alpha support, etc).

I still cannot use Photoshop - or Krita for that matter since they copy Photoshop a lot.

I was a GIMP/Inkscape user first. I have access to the full Creative Cloud Suite but I usually reach for GIMP or Inkscape first because (for me) they are simpler.

I think one area where GIMP/Inkscape are far better is in the export options. Photoshop & Illustrator barely give you any options for jpeg compression or PNG output. GIMP's JPEG export lets me control color subsampling, optimization, and more. Photoshop just gives me 0% - 100% quality.

> Photoshop & Illustrator barely give you any options for jpeg compression or PNG output

It may have been in a different submenu, but the Photoshop JPEG/PNG optimizer was the most powerful/configurable that I've ever seen. Down to letting you configure the palette for PNG.

I looked it up, and it's under "Save for web". It doesn't seem to provide direct chroma subsampling control for JPEG, but the PNG tooling is insane.

IrfanView is truly one of the greatest softwares ever. IMHO, it's the VLC for images.

Anything comparable on Linux?

Nomacs. Not quite there, but feels comparably lightweight. https://nomacs.org/

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