That's exactly how most filters are grouped.

And then there's the GEGL stuff that's leaking implementation details to the user: obviously it should be fixed, but I am certain you can find similar stuff in Adobe's products.

I, for one, having recently been pushed to online MS stuff, certainly see plenty of that in their tools (too many, really, even worse than GNOME ever was when I was active there).

>I am certain you can find similar stuff in Adobe's products

It’s just not comparable and I’m sorry with the history of GIMP it’s all just indefensible, let’s not forget in the two decades it took them to implement Adjustment Layers Blender started focusing on the user not the developer and became a huge contender against non open software, hard to find 3D artists under 25 who didn’t learn via Blender and use it professionally.

An opportunity completely squandered by a poor culture.

GIMP itself has been going on for around 30 years now. I think it proves that the approach to development and design is "defensible".

Blender entered where there was no other good competitor in the market, with a company behind it that built a business around it, and set the standards for UI.

GIMP always kinda had to fight against the incumbents that are too ingrained into customer muscle memory to accept any change. Really, are you saying that the location for GEGL filters in the menu is what stops you from using Gimp?

So the GIMP team wisely chose not to fight, and to build their own thing that serves (hundreds of?) thousands of happy users worldwide (I am one of them: I don't do image editing professionally, but people have complimented me on what I've achieved with Gimp; similarly, moving away from Gimp shortcuts would be expensive for me and would make me really hate any big change of the sort).

Think we’re revising history here, Blender was completely shunned until they started doing the exact opposite of GIMP and building for their users instead of building for the sake of building. It certainly had no first mover advantage and even poor students spent thousands just to not have to learn it and no professional studios used it.

This all changed within a few years of them fixing the UI and focusing on users.

>GEGL filters in the menu is what stops you from using Gimp?

It’s one example but my point is already proven by you calling them “GEGL Filters” step back from your biases for a second and really think about what you wrote and the wider implications to the rest of the application and its users.

People just feel they instinctively have to defend GIMP because it was one of the early larger real desktop Linux open source successes but to me it represents one thing, completely wasted opportunity and the importance of how culture and ideology of a team can squander something that could have been amazing.

“Oh people would never have switched from Photoshop, the workflow and keys are different” is pure cope, we know this because Figma decimated Photoshop and Illustrator as web/app design tools in about 2 years just by offering a better tool.

GIMP could have done this 20+ years ago with the right ideology.

No it could not have done it.

Gimp was ever only an enthusiast developer-driven, and 1-2 engineers that it actively had working on it could not have pulled it off.

It has nothing to do with the ideology, just sheer complexity of the effort: GNOME HIG in the 2.0 times was very much focused on good, consistent UI that caters to the users (mostly driven by Sun Microsystems contributions).

But bringing individual examples of bad UI (I can do so for MacOS, the poster child of usability too) does not mean it's like that on purpose — it's mostly just that, bad instances.

A program is usable based on the whole experience with it, and the results one can achieve. Gimp is not perfect (far from it, really), but for a set of usecases, it is perfectly adequate.

The success or lack of it is not only driven by usability: there are perfectly good tools that simply bit the dust for who knows what reason.

And looking at https://www.blender.org/about/history/, I think Blender mostly owns its success to exactly the marketing approach and not any of the technical properties (its parent companies actually died twice before it was made free software and a base for community competitions).

Which is exactly how I remember it as an outsider (I wasn't interested in 3D at the time).

If you use Adobe, you’re not the prime design persona.

I don't get the implication. I never claimed I was a designer. I'm a get shit done type of person. An operator if you will. Scariest thing you can show me is a Cmd-n blank sheet of paper. Give me content and a task, and it'll get done. Your assumption I'm a designer is just that, and I'm perfectly fine being an ass on my own and do not need your help

I think they might have been implying that you’re not the person they should be designing for. it’s arguable that they should be designing for people who have never used an image editor before. if they were optimizing for adobe users, they should just copy adobe as much as possible

I’d argue they’re doing neither these things.

A design persona is an imaginary person that designers use when thinking about users at a medium level of abstraction…somewhere between actual users and demographics.

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/person...

I didn’t assume anything about you. I took your words at face value. To the degree I said anything about you it was that perhaps Gimp is not for you (because everything isn’t for everybody).

A "design persona" is a stereotype that designers use to justify their decision to discriminate against some subset of users. It seems innocent at first, but it inevitably devolves into the developers crudely binning individual users who submit but reports of feature requests into those stereotypes and then, very often, disregarding their feedback without thoughtful consideration.

"Our Personas document says this software isn't for engineers who taught themselves to use Linux in highschool. This guy who submitted a request to add tabs to the interface looks like a nerd, we don't need to take his suggestion seriously even though he's suggesting a normal thing people who fit into other personas would also find useful."

I think a better UX for average consumer would be more a side-swiping filter menu similar to that of social media mobile apps, with different non-math style names "default blur", "circle blur", etc. Especially as more people do not use desktop computers today.

Also maybe LLM integration so you can just explain what you want done, then it does it, instead of needing to follow some tutorial to learn the software

> Also maybe LLM integration so you can just explain what you want done, then it does it, instead of needing to follow some tutorial to learn the software

I like how this counts as a reasonable side remark today but would have been utterly delusional just a few years ago.

Yes, why bother learning how to use things?

(or invest in UX/user research)

> LLM integration

you mean diffusion-model integration?