I tried it last year in a failed attempt to get of ps, which I to every few years.

I can’t name specifics, but ps is just more intuitive, more user friendly, faster, more stable, gives you more for formats… I don’t even think ps is all that. Even if we forget Adobe owns the pro space here, it’s just not viable to use gimp professionaly. I never understood why gimp doesn’t just copy all the user flows from photoshop when it’s clear that not only they work, but all users are familiar with them from other software.

I like it

GIMP feels non-intuitive sometimes.

For example, layers.

I expect that GIMP internally has a list of all objects that I added to the file. Like, text, brush drawings, pasted images. Instead, I cannot find that list anywhere.

You seem to have a pretty big monitor. Try it on a 13” laptop and you’ll see why it’s harder to use.

Does GIMP even scale with monitor ratios? That was a huge problem last time I tried it. It’s a 4k world out there.

Now admittedly I’m not someone who often uses drawing programs, but my biggest issue in GIMP is that I never seem to be able to find what I’m looking for.

In the two images you posted you can actually see an example of such a case. In Krita all the tools (or whatever you’d call them) in the bar on the left are ordered in a logical way, and separate types of tools are also visually separated by separator lines. The bar with tools is also only 2 icons wide, which makes scanning for the right tool a bit easier, since you can mostly just scan along the vertical axis. In GIMP it’s just a pile of low contrast icons in seemingly random order. Unless you’ve used it enough to know the order, you’re gonna have to do a lot more searching. And searching will be way harder since you’ll have to search horizontally and vertically.

It’s like reading a website where the text is taking the whole with of the screen and without paragraphs (GIMP) vs reading a website where the line length is constrained, the text is horizontally centered, and there are proper paragraphs.

I feel like this example reflects my personal experience with both. I’ve used quite a few different types of image editing programs, and with most of them I can fairly easily find the stuff I need. Using GIMP however, I used to be quite lost. Nowadays it’s gotten better because the windows are not all floating around and I’ve used it more. But still, I only found Krita after using a fair bit of GIMP, and yet I felt instantly more at home because the UI was easier to navigate.

Edit: That being said, GIMP is a very cool program. I don’t want to hate on it too much. It’s helped me countless times. The UI has already improved a lot since the floaty window days, and I hope that continues.

All I want is to GIMP to save tabs layout as workspaces. That is enough. Part of GIMP hate is based on 15 year old complaints. Just like people still complains today about stuff of Linux that has been resolved for decades. It’s just memery that has stuck around.

There are issues with GIMP, but none are about the stuff most people meme about in social media. Every tool has room to grow, but GIMP UI suffers from the “too amateur to know what’s wrong” loud majority effect. Imagine someone who has no concept of music appreciation in their lives sits at the front of a grand organ. Then proceeds to complain that the pedals get in the way of sitting on the stool and that he founds the three keyboards redundant and unintuitive. This notion is valid, from his point of view. But it informs nothing about the usability of that particular instrument for a professional organ player.

The same thing tends to happen with several software packages, specially the open source ones. Since they don’t have the industry standard tag, they don’t get any leniency when it comes to learning their features and capabilities. Then, when the amateur checks them out, they don’t compare it to the industry standard (which does have a leniency license) but compare it to the simplified, accessible for everyone and strip down apps. These people don’t have the foresight to understand that this tool is capable of way more than their reference point, and the initial friction is an indicator of their inexperience, not of the tool’s quality or potential.

The amateur is more comfortable sitting in front of a Casio learner piano. And we shouldn’t lend much credence to their feedback about the ergonomics or key feel of a Steinway concert grand.

I’m just looking through this entire thread, and call me crazy, OP, but you seem angry not more people are using GIMP. You’re quite aggressive about it, attempting to shut down legitimate UI and UX concerns at every corner, and it is genuinely fatiguing to see.

I remember when i first started using GIMP the thing that threw me the most was that there was no ‘safe default’ state that you could get to by pressing escape, like ‘select’ is for other programs.

If you think this is a small thing consider that escape/back is one of the only 3 default controls on phone UIs. It’s super important and Gimp doesn’t have it.

The default toolbox placement is should be conform with other design software.

Sure, people can figure it out once they tried it, but majority of them will move to another software that has familiar experience out of the box.

When people asking me to install GIMP, I always change it to this layout, making it more familiar to another software like Inkscape, Krita, Affinity suites, Photoshop (and other Adobe software), etc.

To pick one example: Shift + Middle-click used to be free zoom, but is now rotation. This is not just frustrating - it’s nauseating. I have a very strong stomach. I don’t get seasick, I don’t get VR-sick, I don’t get regular sick. The last time I threw up involved food poisoning on another continent. But god damn, is it unpleasant having your whole perspective spin while trying to get a little closer to an image.

I asked one of the GIMP devs about this on reddit and was told it was impossible to make optional. Got some genuine ass-ache for pushing against the idea that anything was impossible, in software, especially when the desired functionality could just be… not. A checkbox would suffice instead of arbitrary reconfiguration. I’d be okay with the mess of arbitrary changes since GIMP 1.6 or whatever I’d been rocking, if one of the central adjustments hadn’t been reconfigured to make me physically ill.

As others have mentioned, it’s simple things takes alot time finding/figuring out.

I use GIMP within Ubuntu MATE few times a week to edit pictures. Simple edits nothing major.

One of the thing I need regularly is to highlight certain part of the picture.

Now in Microsoft Paint I can draw a rectangle, choose its border thickness, and color in 2 seconds.

I have learned how to do the same in GIMP few times but it took alot of time and I still forgets after few weeks.

So now I just reboot the PC and log into Windows or use Windows virtual machine and draw rectangle in 2 seconds in Microsoft Paint.

Mine is extremely simple use case, so I can only guess how difficult or how time consuming it would be for actual professional to create artistic work in GIMP vs Photoshop (or in similar commercial software).

Just my 2 cents.

I can never put my finger on why I don’t stick with GIMP. I install it on every machine I own, and occasionally use it to open a file and export to another file format.

From time to time, I tell myself I will finally sit down and just only use GIMP. Finally learn the tool. Envitably I find myself googling to find every tool, and then I will come across something simple, like making a red rectangle, and I end up having to google how to do it, and then get frustrated that I can’t just draw a box and quit.

There are probably legit reasons for the decisions, but if it kills my workflow, I can’t afford to use it.

Every time I install gimp in an attempt to switch over, I find myself frustrated that the tools I commonly use on other programs are not either available by default or unintuitive enough that 20 minutes of looking through tools, tabs, and menus has not provided the results I went looking for.

I try every few years, or every major update, whichever happens first.

It’s not what the buttons look like, it’s what they do. In Krita, making an ellipse involves clicking the ellipse button and dragging it somewhere. You now have an ellipse, and you hold shift if you want to make it a circle instead.

In GIMP there is no direct ellipse tool, there’s only an ellipse select tool, likewise you hold shift to make it a circle. Then you use a menu item to select the border of your selection, getting a popup to let you determine how much pixels you want. And then, you use the fill tool or fill menu item to fill it. That’s a surprising amount of clicks to accomplish what’s most likely the single most common task for anyone opening a screenshot in an image editor. I’m not aware of any easier/faster method to do it. Feels like it should exist, but this is also what you get if you search for how to draw a circle in GIMP, so if it exists everyone’s missing it.

GIMP’s method gives you more power, but you rarely ever need that power. But when you do, Krita also has ellipse select, border select and various fill tools that can be strung together in the same way.