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gimp is kinda jank yeah but when people have Serious Takes about how it needs to improve all i can read is "here is how these four guys working intermittently for free have FAILED to live up to the international company making twenty billion dollars a year"

"personally i would just make it be good" great, stop fucking posting about it and get to work then

this is frustrating in a way that's hard to fit in a bleat but it boils down to people not appreciating the outright miracle that open source software is in the first place and then wanting to be treated like a customer when it's not an exact replica of something that costs $700

the thing krita and blender have in common is that PEOPLE GAVE THEM A LOT OF MONEY

the developers of other foss software aren't idiots waiting for someone to tweet "have you tried making good ux?" at them — they just don't have the resources to hire ux designers and do user studies and whatever else because they are giving their fucking work to you for free

I think it also is another thing: some people actually LIKE the 'bad' UX, so it puts them in a weird position: if they did honestly redo everything, it'd make it lose the identity that a group wanted.

Another thing people ALWAYS gloss over is that Photoshop has bad UX as well. More people are just familiar with it. I learned on GIMP and got used to it, and liked it. I decided to "get serious" and tried learning Photoshop and it was MISERABLE, the workflow was backwards and everything was hidden

yes the few times i've been exposed to photoshop i haven't been able to find a goddamn thing. people do regularly confuse "thing i've been using for twenty years" with "good UX"

I mean in a certain sense it very much *is* good ux to leverage existing familiarity, especially if existing users of previous versions of your thing are the vast majority of your addressable userbase

kind of a double-edged sword, though — the more closely you try to match (especially if it's right down to the menus), the less you have your own identity, and the more you're stuck chasing an endless long tail of little things that don't match, rather than working on your own ideas

oh for sure for a competing product, I was thinking more in terms of, say, photoshop not wanting to reinvent the wheel with each new edition