Hi Ryan.
Your collection of pet peeves is impressive. Yet I believe that your
generalization that they must affect everybody is blown way out of
proportion.
Ryan Stark via gimp-developer-list (gimp-developer-list@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> So many of Gimp's features seem unfinished. For example, look at the
> guides. There are horizontal and vertical guides similar to Inkscape in
> operation yet no diagonal guides which would be an obvious addition.
Why not go a step further? Have e.g. bezier shaped guides you could
manipulate freely? Wouldn't that be wonderful?
Wait, thats already there. Never mind. What was your point again?
> Applying any dynamics to a brush causes Gimp to go at an absolute snail's
> pace. Why? And why on earth are all those hideous brushes, patterns etc
> still included in Gimp when there are other better and free ones available?
> This makes Gimp look very poor to any new user.
Brushes and Patterns may get referenced by user scripts. We consider it
a bad thing to break compatibility for no good reason (and "someone
might not like this pattern" is not a good reason).
Suggestions for new good patterns with a clear and unambigous statement
about them being in the public domain are welcome.
> The little sliders to
> adjust values are not very good and text entry is horrible.
Please elaborate.
> You can't go
> from from single window mode to multiple without your layout being messed
> up.
Works for me. What window manager do you use?
> Having a UI like this without being able to save your windows layouts
> is crazy.
My window layout gets remembered. Again: What window manager do you
use?
> I've encountered many bugs and a few crashes in Gimp 2.10 which
> never used to happen. For example there is some kind of problem where
> certain actions with a mouse or pen causes docked tabs to constantly break
> free without reason.
Gimp 2.10 is pretty much rock solid for me. No idea what you're witnessing.
> The problem is that some people may be prepared for a few problems, report
> a few bugs etc but then it just gets tedious and they move to another app.
> I believe many will do this with Gimp.
> As for any contribution I could make, that would only be with using Gimp as
> a painting app and the brushes because I've been through the brush engines
> of just about every app out there. This is why I like Mypaint and the new
> features. However, every time I try to use Gimp I end up in other programs,
> including Clip Paint Studio which I run in Wine. I would much rather use
> Gimp.
But why don't you use the tool that works best for you? Why do you
insist on using Gimp if it is as bad as you claim it to be?
If Clip Paint Studio does everything you need, why switch?
And I do mean this: I stopped evangelizing in favor of Gimp ages ago. If
someone is happy with a tool there is nothing to gain to convince them
to use a different tool, it always results in frustration about the fact
that GIMP is different from the other tool.
And it also leads to a lot of frustration on the developer side, because
we then do get the pressure to align GIMP with the behaviour of the
random other tool, because that is the one true way (tm) on how certain
workflows have to work.
> What are the solutions to these problems? I don't really know but i think
> once some bad design decisions are made with an app it is very hard to fix
> things. The developers or at least some developer who has a vision on how
> to improve things is the most crucial component. I think the problem with a
> lot of software is that the developers do not use the software extensively
> or study how other programs do things.
That is true and this matches our experience. We have a ton of bad
decisions in the GIMP codebase (Images are always 8-bit RGB, right?) and
their legacy haunts us to this very day, although a lot of progress has
been made in the last few years. As for not using our own tool
ourselves: we do know that we have that kind of blind spot, but then we
also have the dialog with our users.
And if the lack of diagonal guides would be as neck-breaking as you make
it sound then we'd have a ton of feedback from all kinds of users about
it. We do have tons of users and it is not very hard to find quite
positive reviews of GIMP. The lack of diagonal guides is not a common
talking point. Neither is the selection of default brushes or weird
behaviour of the gui window management.
I suspect that the problems you see as absolutely crucial are quite
irrelevant for others and easily compensated by the ton of other
features where Gimp works quite well for them. Please try to consider
that before claiming that GIMP is doomed because we do have bad default
brushes.
Thank you.
Simon
--
simon@xxxxxxxx http://simon.budig.de/
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