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eevee
@eev.ee

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"

Chris Person@papapishu.bsky.social

GIMP is objectively unintuitive and also can’t parse text layers of PSDs properly, it’s designed by FOSS people that have never created tools for professionals. Telling someone to use it for their job is like saying you can make a feature on iMovie. Technically true but not serious.

eevee
@eev.ee

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

eevee
@eev.ee

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

eevee
@eev.ee

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

Lufty@lufty-luft.bsky.social

But still... blender actually got some traction once they decided to make things more user friendly. Krita's newer than the GIMP, and much more popular. UX is something that does matter, even making allowances for 'free and volunteer made' open source software.

eevee
@eev.ee

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

‮Jeff Eaton
@eaton.fyi

OTOH sometimes it’s kind of both. Was one of the core developers of a FOSS project that got investment and hired actual UX professionals to tackle areas users has persistently complained about. There was a shocking amount of pushback, even anger and outrage, by devs who insisted it was a waste…

‮Jeff Eaton
@eaton.fyi

… and that the effort was “just time wasted by pixel pushers who can’t write their own patches,” etc. Things have improved over the (decade+!) since then but the UX team was p badly burnt by it, and it taught me a lot about the fact that simply resourcing something doesn’t change a community.

‮Jeff Eaton
@eaton.fyi

The dynamic you mention (tool made by/for devs also has a crowd of non-decs wishing it were easier for them) is real, but also when FOSS projects and advocates get Big Ideas about project evangelism and decide a project should be used by everybody… some of them morph into “ux is just fluff”

eevee
@eev.ee

this makes me realize — adobe surely has separate core vs UX teams. but a foss project with only a few major contributors doesn't! it's the same people. so do they prioritize "mere" UX or e.g. better colorspace support (which i've also seen cited as a reason gimp isn't "serious" software)?

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eevee
@eev.ee

if your software just plain cannot do things that are critical for some amount of prospective users, then UX *is* fluff, relative to fleshing out the feature set. especially since adding features might mean you have to rethink the UX later anyway

‮Jeff Eaton
@eaton.fyi

Yeah, it also reminds me of the “why don’t game companies release their internal tools so people can make mods” arguments that went on for a long time. The UX that works for “i need to manipulate the internal state of a game engine whose devs I sit next to” is dif than “I want to add extra dialogue”

eevee
@eev.ee

i have seen the tools they used to make the original doom levels and i would not wish them on anyone

‮Jeff Eaton
@eaton.fyi

Flashbacks to the days after Marathon (90s Marathon) was released and nerds on usenet reverse engineered the map format and made new maps in *hex editors*