Hacker News

"Anti-user' and "anti-usability" are far too harsh. Outdated, yes. A product of 1990s-era UX design, absolutely. But every changelog has some mention of a UX improvement, and actually using the product at version 3.0 is, dare I say, pretty enjoyable once you unlearn things and pretend it's Photoshop 6.0. Single-window mode by default helps a ton.

I have used far worse software from commercial outfits. You would not believe how much aerospace and specialized CAD stuff still uses Motif and doesn't support scroll wheels or extra mouse buttons.

I think that the weakness doesn't lie within GIMP itself.

Imagine that you are a car hobbyist. You know your way around a wrench.

But then you step in to an F1 garage or even your local repair shop run by that one guy who inheritted his father's shop in the 50s and has thrown a tool away since the Reagan administration.

It's going to be possible for you to do everything that you know how to do, and even to learn some things along the way, but you're not going to be anywhere near as efficient as you were in your garage where the only tools you have are the ones you regularly use and you know the locations (perhaps roughly) of everything.

The same could be applied across any number of domains. Knowing your way around and ambulance isn't going to go as far as you might think it would in a surgical suite.

Knowing some python isn't going to get your pulls accepted in Canonical, Debian, etc.

Knowing your professors preffered citation methodology isn't going to gaurantee academically succesful searching of The Library of Congress or even the New York Public Library.

etc etc etc

GIMP represents nearly the totality of knowledge relating to image manipulation, and you can lay it out to perfectly match your personal knowledge and workflow, but it simply is not possible to have it automatically laid out to perfectly match everyone's workflow.

Could it be more intuitive? Perhaps, but moving things around now is liable to break the workflows of tens of thousands who have learned to use and love GIMP the way that it currently is.

For instance, having only ever used GIMP as my primary image manipulation tool, I can and do have some of the same complaints against [insert other software] that people routinely level against GIMP. The last time I tried to use Photoshop I spent more time in tutorials and help pages than doing actual image editting because Photoshop is as unfamiliar to me as GIMP is to a Photoshop user.

> Unfortunately, the rest of the interviews from that event have never seen the light of day - until now!

Not really -- It invites speculation as to why they were not published for 9 years. And, are the words spoken a decade ago still valid?

You just bought 1000 litres of milk!

Let me be clear, this has nothing to do with pushing "linguistic sensitivity" for its own sake. Nothing.

Look, the author himself wondered out loud why he wasn't more deservedly popular. I put forth a reason why. PR is real. I understand if you really want to keep the name at the possible cost of popularity; but I don't think it's worth it. I wonder if he understood the possible tradeoff.

What is the name for this fallacy, "We should all start being adults"? Everyone who is an adult can understand that names matter, especially ones intentionally chosen to cause offense or a ruckus.

First, it doesn't matter how much you or I or the commentator above us changes to "be adults". Only the saddest and most lonesome people will be the sole decisionmaker in every context they exist in.

Sometimes, you exist in a context where you need someone elses permission to use software. This is often the case for employed people.

Second, other adults will disagree with you. It doesn't make them any less "adults".

On the other hand, someone would not be unreasonable to consider you childish if you're so stuck up on your software opinions that you'll disparage everyone around you in the defense of your obscure preferred image editing program. Could you imagine implying to a room of peers that you're the only adult?

It's wonderful for you that GIMP's name has never been a problem for you. But there are about 8 billion people who are not you, and a few dozen of them are fellow GIMP users.

I've been using GIMP for most of its existence but I've faced difficulties trying to use it in school and work. Where I live, "gimp" is a word which means either a slur for someone with a motor disability or as a form-fitting leather sex torture-fetish full-body garment.

(For what it's worth, the G was added in order to reference the form-fitting leather sex torture-fetish full-body garment in Pulp Fiction. The program was called 'IMP' beforehand.)

Yes, every time I post this point, I get this sort of "but I'm not offended" response.

I'm not either, personally. But I live in America, a pretty strong force, for better or lately probably worse. And GIMP is very good software, but the name makes it hard to recommend or take seriously. Not even in terms of "I'm offended" but in terms of "if you thought this software was good why would you name it something like that?"

GIMP perhaps could have competed with Adobe stuff, but we will never know because this name doesn't make it out the door for a number of related reasons. Don't shoot me on this fact, I'm just the messenger.

But do they want to do a full UI revamp? My impression is that a lot of people in the gimp ecosystem are happy to be aggressively unwelcoming to a broader audience. They don't see the name or the poor ux as a bug, but as a feature, and actively attack people who want to fix these issue. They call then "snowflakes" and "SJWs" and are gleeful when they fail to make any kinds of improvements.

Some of these people can be found in this very thread.

The problem with gimp is not one of budgets, it's that many of the people involved in gimp see its current state as how things should be.

> If there's one point where OSS stands like a sore thumb (derogatory) is in everything that makes it welcoming to general users

Depending on the circle (including lots of circles of "general users") annoying people who are obsessed about whether something could offend snowflakes is seen as welcoming.