this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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If only gimp wasn't garbage.. Tbh I'm also kinda wondering how Affinity did pull off the move they made with their 3 programs turning into one, at the same time redoing so much of it.am And why foss can't do it.
Of course there's money and closed source is probably messier in a lot of places than foss is (or at least targets to be), but is that it?
Unironic question: is it possible to explain to a non-artistic, non-graphic-design techie like me what makes GIMP so inadequate? I hear this refrain a lot but have never heard an explanation for why it falls SO short that it's not a viable alternative for most people.
The UI feels quite haphazard, it doesn't follow the same approach to UI like other drawing tools and it feels like it's trying to reinvent the wheel when people are already used to certain areas on the screen being used for certain things, and personally the UI scaling looked quite rough last I looked at it. It just gave me the vibe of a programmer made tool to have something graphic to edit things rather than one a designer spent time r&d-ing from the bottom up.
A few years ago I tried putting text on a path (think "curvy text"). First tried gimp, quit frustrated after about a hour. While at some point I "kind of" got it to work, it looked like shit. Then I opened photoshop, was done in about three minutes. Note that I never did it before in photoshop nor gimp.
Luckily, nowadays I just open photopea whenever I would have used photoshop in the past. The fact that one single guy built a better photo editor than gimp should tell you everything.
It's been a long time since I last used it so I don't remember specifics, but I found really basic stuff that would take a couple of seconds to do in photoshop were a lot more difficult in gimp. Krita is better...
Was it more difficult or just unfamiliar? Like, if you'd given it a couple of weeks maybe it would have become intuitive? Or was it just bad UX?
I use gimp at least weekly. The UX isn't great imo, but I'm used to it now, and I'm sure Photoshop would boggle my mind. It also has improved quite a bit in the past years.
I know its not realistic, but I just imagine how great GIMP would be if people donated just 1/20th of what they pay Adobe to the GIMP devs.
Same with LibreOffice vs Office.
We are really missing out on some potentially fantastic software so that a few people can be in the centibillionaire club and it makes me sangry
I know that's true about more than just software, but the way to "fight back" here is so easy and low risk compared to fighting the other cartels that farm us for $$. It is as easy as not using their products and services if there is a viable alternative that respects your humanity.
it's difficult to tell if it's bad ux or unfamiliarity when you're good at using one and not the other, and not really worth the effort when switching to krita was easier.