pics

This is the truth, right here. GIMP's user interface is an entire F5 tornado's worth of bullshit and it always has been. I always put it forth as the poster child of precisely how not to do it with any open source productivity software of any stripe and it's consistently never failed to serve as an example for nigh-on decades.

If the GIMP people would just suck it up and broadly copy the layout of... well, pretty much anything, even MS Paint, it'd be a massive improvement to usability and would probably confer a tenfold increase to the number of users willing to try it out. Or at least stick with it for more than five minutes.

I'm sure it's a perfectly capable program that's able to do many things. I just can't be bothered to put up with it. And this is coming from somebody who willingly uses FreeCAD.

Somehow in the transition from the bunch-of-disparate-floating-toolbar-windows paradigm to the current all-in-one design they've managed to make it slightly worse. GIMP's feature discoverability is basically nonexistent, and the uninitated have no hope of figuring out how to do anything with it other than doodle with the preset brushes without resorting to tutorials.

I can't believe the dockers ("dockable dialogs") still take up so much space yet somehow there isn't room to put title bars on them describing what they do even when you have one of them open and not just tabbed with an inscrutable icon at the top, nor is there any discoverable way to dismiss any of them once you're done with them because that option is buried in a flyout menu for some reason.

I could go on forever. Don't get me started.

I am a FOSS nerd for sure but GIMP sucks and it's awful. I'd rather individually plink pixels into a bitmap manually from the command line with Imagemagick than use GIMP.