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Comment by skohan | Hacker News Reader

I have tried to use GIMP, but in my experience the UI is just so unintuitive and hard to use.

When was the last time you used it? The UI has improved significantly in the last two years or so

Not too long ago, probably earlier this year

I tried to use gimp and I really wanted to like it, but I can’t. It’s clumsy and looks like death. I’d rather pay for something more polished.

I don't get this. I've used GIMP and Phptoshop and the UI differences are trivial.

Really? To give just one example, if I press cmd-T in PS, I go into an editing mode where I can translate, rotate, and scale a layer with intuitive, contextual mouse controls for each. With GIMP it's broken up into separate commands. I didn't spend so much time with it, but with PS things got guessable very quickly, where with GIMP it felt like the features are just stuffed in there wherever they can fit.

That proves the point, you simply don't know how to use Gimp yet. It is called "Unified Transform", available on the default toolbar or by pressing "shift-t". So the difference is literally pressing shift instead of control, a trivial difference by any standard, and reconfigurable as well.

Yes it does prove the point. So if I look at these docs[0], this tool, not only does it do translate/rotate/scale, which are the most fundamental image transformations in 2D editing, but it also does shearing and perspective transformations which are rarely used by comparison. This tool was clearly designed from an implementation-driven perspective (just put all the affine transformations in one place) rather than a UX driven perspective (no designer places these tools together conceptually).

On top of that, this tool still sits along side other single purpose tools for scaling and rotating, which are the first results if you search "how to rotate in GIMP", so why should I even expect this tool to exist?

This is not intuitive UX which is "trivially different" to PS, this is a mess which can only be learned through laborious trial and error, or reading the documentation like a book.

[0]:https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-tool-unified-transform.ht...

Many open source projects such as Gimp have a serious UX problem. Software engineers are great at delivering efficient systems. In terms of usability they’re arrogant and inflexible. They’re two different skills and I wish project maintainers understood that.

> the UI differences are trivial.

That depends on which version you use. IIRC the version in the Ubuntu/*buntu repo's have a patch to bring the UI closer to PS, at least in appearance.

There are also some functions which you have to do differently in GIMP vs PS.

I want to like it, but GIMP is almost unusable for me. Really hard to do even basics, and have to spend a lot of time googling how to do what I want to do.

You wouldn't expect Photoshop to be immediately usable for a newbie either. I've always been completely stumped by Photoshop, but I haven't spent enough time in it to expect otherwise.

True, but I've been using GIMP a long time - more than a decade. Used it for years longer and years before I used Adobe CS. Taken a number of tutorials on it. Will always be super clunky.

All I really want is Fireworks. Never found a true replacement for it.

To be fair, photoshop probably has more people working on UX than the entire team which maintains Gimp. Of course it will be better in that regard.

Most Mac users just want something that works, open source.and freedom is not important

I'm a huge fan of FOSS, but open source products also have to stand on their own merits. The best way for FOSS to succeed is for FOSS products to be as good or better than closed alternatives. Otherwise they will always be relegated to a small audience of a few die-hards.

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