No. Importance of UX simply means advance users can customize their workflow while making it easy to use for casual users.

Kinda like Krita or Blender. Both are not perfect, but the dev are working on it, together with the community.

Even GIMP dev also working on that, they have GIMP UX issue tracker here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/

“your program should look and behave exactly like this other program made by a corpo, because I’ve learned that one already” Oftentimes established workflow is already simple. There’s no need to reinvent this from scratch. Example: Npainter and AzPainter are heavily inspired by PaintToolSAI. Inochi Creator is a clone (with unique feature) of Live2D Cubism.

I think the difference is with their software you can play around the UI and figure out things by intuition and trial and error

The same thing is not enough in FOSS in many cases. Like for ex, drawing solid shapes in GIMP

That is NOT at all what people are saying. They’re saying that glueing together 15 different UX paradigms into a program is not as intuitive as something designed before it was coded by people with expertise in exactly that. Design is real no matter how much you don’t want it to be. This attitude is directly hurting open source software.

Valve sells all of its computers with Linux on it, no?

no, we want the tried and tested workflow that works well for pros to use.

take it as someone who used photoshop professionally in the past.

The year of of the Linux happened long ago. However we fail to recognize it, because wasn’t exactly what we were expecting. Most super computer is TOP500 as well as servers and majority of portable devices in the world are powered by the Linux kernel.

If the definition of Year of Linux was based on having astonishing UX then, this is probably something that will never happen.

There is no easier to use and more functional desktop with great user experience than Linux.

Ignoring the fact that you make it sound like Linux has a single unified desktop experience…

I’d love to hear your reason for thinking that. I’m a Linux fanboy and even I’m smelling the bullshit.

I’ve used MacOS for about 20 years, and it’s a shit show. But…

Where are your files?

They are in my user folder, same as every other OS. I can see them all in Finder. Root is hidden, but that’s options “tick box to display disks”.

What is happening at full screen

So what you would consider maximise is “move to new dedicated virtual desktop”, but you can also cmd+click maximise, drag to the top to traditional maximise or left/right for half screen.

I will say macs are great when you get used it, especially if you use keyboard shortcuts.

I’d say the opposite. How do I move this window to the next desktop using shortcut keys? You have to display desktops and then drag or to the desktop you want. No real shortcut for a basic feature.

Emoji picker also seems to be broken, so when adding something on a chat I have to navigate with keyboard because clicking on the emoji I want works about 50% of the time, they rest of the time it just closes the window.

I found Inkscape when I needed to make some diagrams, and even though that’s not really what it’s for, it blows dedicated diagram tools out of the water.

Inkscape is actually fun to use because it strikes a nice balance between easy and powerful.

My only problem with GIMP lately has been that by default it’s used monochrome tool icons which are really hard to tell apart. Which seems like a real form-over-function decision (likely made by the distribution though).

Pretty much every filter I need from PS like levels, curves, unsharp mask, blurs, etc are there and I even get all of my layer styles. If you were familiar with photoshop circa cs3 era I honestly think it’s just better, but I’m a Linux user and software engineer, not a professional graphic designer or photo manipulator

I avoided it for so long and just used photopea online instead because I thought krita was just for drawing and I don’t do that. I’m sure it’s fantastic for that but I don’t draw and was so used to photoshop I didn’t imagine it’d be basically a better version of it and written in QT, but I was pretty surprised at how it’s just that

Not low at all. After you contribute the maintainer be like “can you rebase it all to one commit”

And then you end up force pushing and ping 4000 people

Or you accidentally close your pull request

Downsides for sure, but it does work.

I knew someone would make this comment but that’s kind of the point. rc cars are toys after all, and it’s fine as a hobby but if professional driving would be better with twin sticks I feel like motorsports would have already adopted it.

Have I got a D9 Cat waiting for you! Drive with those twin brake levers 10 to 14 hours a day! You will get to dig ditches and level whole mountains!

Edit to add: And drink Red Bull and eat Honey Buns while doing it too!

genius reply. i love that in the same comment where you say devs can’t be design gods you say designers should make an entire software platform.

and no, they’re not supposed to be design gods, which is why I said there should be a platform that enables designers to contribute, which would take the burden off the devs. words must be hard.

If we can’t criticize because we can’t make it, might as well shut up for life.

that’s not what they were saying.

They were saying there wish there was a way for designers to contribute. Git is a pain in the ass. lets be real. Important, but a pain. Its a bad UI.

Design isn’t the same as code, so the same process and repos aren’t necessarily going to help. that’s all they didn’t say anything insulting. Only that they wish there was a away for designers to contribute. Why is that hurting peoples feelings?

We should make just one more standards agency! To include all the standards for everything!

Just use the terminal to send keyboard and mouse events, you hopeless noob!

wtype -M shift "A" -m shift
wtype -k enter
swaymsg seat seat0 cursor set_position 100 200
ydotool mousemove -100 50
ydotool click 0`

In fact it’s even more efficient!

My experience with Jetbrains was that they did not rely on vendor lock-in, but on actually making a product worth paying for. I could move my projects away from their suite easily, the build tools and scripts where all third-party open-source. I just didn’t want to.

But perhaps things are different in other spaces. I can imagine using Kotlin might lock you in more.

That is interesting and I did not know that. Thanks.

True, but I prefer intuition over efficiency when I pick something up for the first time, second time, and third time, until I eventually have a good enough understanding to begin worrying about efficiency.

There are use cases for Libre office writer, just as there are for vim, even though they are both capable of producing text documents. One is arguably more intuitive while one is arguably more efficient, but if I didn’t know anything about word processing/text editing and had to pick between the two, I would pick writer.

Same goes for anything else, and it’s also why a decent number of text editors/software support emacs/vim bindings - so that you can use the software intuitively, and then once you understand it, you can become more efficient by using modal bindings. Same goes for GIMP versus other software. The thing about other softwares in the same genre is that they can be learned relatively easily and can also be used efficiently. GIMP I find harder to learn, even if it is efficient later.

For anyone who is new who has to make a choice as well - very few people would pick vim to start out with.

Furthermore, in this instance, I do have a decent amount of photo editing experience and have used multiple softwares to do it, but even after that, the problem I have with GIMP is that a lot of this knowledge does not transfer to GIMP like it does for other software. If I learn photoshop, I can get away with using affinity, krita, corel draw, clip studio, and other software - but not nearly as easily GIMP.

I would also argue that efficiency is equally dependent upon the software as it is the task. The workflow for digital painting, animation, and photo editing are all quite different, and no one UX/UI is the most efficient at all of them. This is why most of these softwares have modular interfaces, which is good, but I simply find the modular interface of GIMP harder to use or understand versus the rest.

Intuitively finding basics everybody starting out needs in the ui takes a backseat to the pro who is using all the shortcuts and custom workspace layouts going to adapt to the changes anyway. Especially as basically no one uses gimp professionally all day and the people who would use it are not using gimp cause it’s not intuitive.

I can’t wait for freecad to stop being just an poweful near peer and actually become an usable near peer.

Blender is so versatile, and has so many applications that you have to end up with a cluttered interface. Since the alternatives have licenses that have a steep cost, I would say that putting up with a clunky interface is well worth it.

Haha, yes the feeling is similar there, though I think I personally still had an easier time learning blenders current workflow.

Coming from maya where everything is on modifier key and a sub second flick of your mouse and having to use something as disgusting and alow as “hotkeys” is an adjustment. Everything but the ui is geat. Except for 3d cursor, fuck that stupid thing. I have a 3d cursor, it’s my cursor.

And lack of the x y z coordinate setter. Getting something to 000 is impossible and setting prescise pivots is a nightmare.

I’ve never been into vector graphics, but I had reason to use Inkscape recently, and I was actually surprised by how easy to use it was and how much the UI made sense.

I have used inkscape though it has been some time. I felt as though it was not super featureful at the time so the UI felt slightly barren compared to something like Adobe Illustrator, but I don’t recall having the same kind of trouble with it that I do with GIMP honestly.

I like inkscape but ive used AI minimally and found AI more unintuitive.

I guess it’s based on your previous experience

I think what you are thinking of is the ellipse selection tool, and yes this exists and can be used - however I am referring to the tool class of geometric shapes which is quite common among other software. Basically it creates a vector (In most cases I think) shape with options for stroke and fill, and controls the same way that the ellipse selection tool does (constraints etc.).

GIMP does not have this, instead you have to go through a decent amount of trouble to get simple geometric shapes drawn to the screen, and at that I believe they are always raster.

Take these procedures as an example for GIMP.

https://www.alphr.com/make-shapes-gimp/

This makes GIMP difficult if you want to use it for some niche uses such as making a quick flow diagram, or a quick vector mask which can be changed later.

As an engineer: 1000% agree.

Seriously, why do I have to pay a value somewhere close to £1000 for a set of FUCKING PDFs?!?

This is ridiculous. Make money from audits, certifications, training, and conferences. You can still make absolute stacks from those. Why the fuck do I or my company need to shell out thousands just so we know what to certify against to be able to sell stuff?!

It’s a fucking racquet and they know it. But it’s either one of 3 options:

• Find someone who’s willing to send you the PDF or log in credentials for a library service that has access to these standards.

• Take the risk downloading PDFs from dodgy sites you found on the 5th page of duckduckgo.

• Bend over and spread open your wallet. Because good luck getting anything delivered to a customer without it.

Stick a pin in your mouse cable and whizz it round like a compass. Easy.

I was going to make a gif tutorial but I screwed up the recording and I’ve lost all motivation.

File, New, set resolution multiple of 1000, like 2000x2000

View, Show Grid

View, Snap to Grid

Image, Configure Grid, set pixels under Spacing to desired height, if aspect ratio is checked it will automatically adjust the width to match, like 50x50 for example

Zoom in towards center, click and drag vertical and horizontal ruler to the center using the location value on the bottom left

Create first transparent layer

Select brush tool, the big circle brush, and set size to 1000 and click at the center

Select eraser tool, set size to 960 and click center

New layer

Brush to 700, center

eraser to 670, center

New layer

brush to 60, between rings

eraser to 40, on new dot

New layer

Using brush at size 20px, click and shift click to create lines, draw a square and a right triangle in the top-left quadrant in the centermost circle by connecting points on the rim.

Select every layer, copy and paste

With new layers selected, select all

Transform, Rotate, ensure that the centerpoint is the actual center with the on screen reticle, and rotate the circle 90 degrees. Repeat process but rotate 180 degress.

Export image, you’re done.

EDIT: I guess I didn’t really explain Whitespace Utilization, you can use a white brush instead of eraser to cover the layer beneath.

Once you’re ready to export, flatten image to a single layer and then under color, color to alpha, white should already be selected

Add a new layer, white layer, move the layer to the bottom of the stack

Done

Yeeh gimme a bit

Yeeh

Truly amazing when you think about it. We are all so entitled.

Almost as entitled as the corporations who want to charge us rent to do something relatively simple like this on a modern computer, and have actively attempted to undermine general accessibility to tools like this in order to profit more.

My kids use Chromebooks at school. What I call “Word” they call “Docs”. It’s very clear why Google gives this operating system away for free.

For decades Apple paid schools to teach on their computers. In the 80s and much of the 90s, all you’d find in computer labs was Macs.

It didn’t work because PCs were just better for businesses at the time.

Your description of vendor lock-in is obviously solvable by developers making a competing UI and workflow similar to the most popular software, and enabling new features under another menu. That said, there is obviously minimal interest in doing so.

This is UI. UI is not vendor lock-in. Lock-in costs users money to break out of, not developers.

You mean a common user experience that leaves many new users frustrated.

Not really. “Industry standard” just means it’s commonly used in the industry. “Open specification” is the opposite of “vendor locked”, e.g. OAuth for authentication.

Agreed. They have a lot of the required plumbing now. There are some non-destructive editing workflows in GIMP.

I think holding back 3.0 for so long was a mistake. It no longer matters though. It is out now and it can be improved dramatically without such a long break between the dev version and stable.

We will see what the next couple of years brings.

and GIMP dev actually planning to add shape tool.

Gimp’s first version released in 1998. Do you find it surprising that people aren’t impressed by plans to add basic tools after nearly 30 years when the competition has stuff like content-aware filling and automatic layer separation?

There are many valid arguments against using Adobe products, or for using open source editing software. Productivity and ease of use are not one of them.