If by importance of UX you mean “your program should look and behave exactly like this other program made by a corpo, because I’ve learned that one already”.
In reality The Year Of The Linux might never arrive, it doesn’t have a multibillion corporation spending multi billions in order to make Linux a default software on every computer you buy. (to pedants: Android doesn’t count)
“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.
Not in the example we’re talking about though. Photoshop isn’t simple, nothing in it is. And for the software that is, it doesn’t mean you can’t come up with the better UX. We shouldn’t discourage people from trying to invent something better just because it isn’t what we already have.
I believe when majority of people saying “Photoshop has this, we should do this as well” are not actually saying GIMP should create a total carbon-copy.
People loves easy to use interface, not carbon copy of Photoshop, even if they don’t say that. They just don’t know how to articulate their frustration better.
When Affinity Photo emerges as actual Photoshop alternative, no one complains regarding “not being Photoshop clone” because the interface is actually easier than Photoshop, while still being advanced software.
New GIMP user complaining about interface “not being Photoshop clone” is indicator that GIMP interface is not easy to use and intuitive enough.
when majority of people saying “Photoshop has this, we should do this as well” are not actually saying GIMP should create a total carbon-copy
And I see with my own eyes how some people are saying exactly that. Sometimes they wrap it into something like “photoshop is intuitive industry standard that takes zero seconds to learn and everyone is born with perfect understanding of it, and everything that isn’t that is an affront to god and actively violates all my senses”. I’m paraphrasing a bit.
There’s always small group of people that prefer certain software and refuse to change, they might even hate when the software gets updated.
Heck, some people even still use obsolete creative softwares despite the development company is dead for almost 20 years.
I conclude that as I’ve been helping people setting their computer as well as teaching people to use various softwares for 15 years :)
I always try to know what things they want to do and their skill level, then recommending software that might be suitable for them. It can be proprietary, but most of the time I tried to recommend FOSS alternative instead.
Ehhh flexibility is a good feature to have, but it’s not a requirement for good UX. Good UX should work for both beginner and advanced users, whether you do that through a single UI, different presets, or customizable panels depends on the use case and features available. A good music player for example doesn’t need a highly flexible UI to have good UX.
If anything, a good UX should know what tools people use most and how the rest of the market does theirs to have something that’s transferrable but also that works well with your feature set and brand vision
I’m talking flexible UI as relative to Clip Studio Paint.
The software is now an industry standard for manga, webtoon, 2D animation, and general ACG-related illustration in Asia.
It was so good that there’s no other alternative that have it. Not even Photoshop or Krita.
I read that Krita dev also agree that it will be nice to have it.
There’s a ton of unique workflow only be possible with it.
For three years I worked teaching computers to adults, and for four years I was a system administrator/helpdesk for a big office.
I can absolutely assure you, from my experience, there is nothing inheritly easier or harder to figure out in close source software vs foss, in windows vs linux, in gui vs console, in Photoshop vs Gimp.
The only difference is, what did a person encountered before. The idea that you can give a person photoshop and they will draw you a sold shape, but you give the same person gimp and they will not be able to never stood up to my experience with probably thousands of people.
I for one have never used Photoshop but I used to use Gimp occasionally for some semi-technical markup and annotation. I remember being baffled by how to make a hollow circle, as opposed to a solid one. I kept forgetting the process so I had to look it up every time. Nowadays I just use canva since I don’t want to analyse menus and tool options every time. I don’t have to use Photoshop to say that Gimp’s UI can be better. Anyway, I also use Audacity extensively and although it’s not as outstanding of a case as Gimp, the older versions were a pain, nowadays it’s much better but still plenty to improve (I have not used other audio editing softwares)
Then again I learn software by intuition and exploring menus (rarely I go to read the manual, as do majority of the people I imagine), if I was taught how to use it by someone like you, maybe things would be different, but I doubt that’s how most people interact with software.
Every editing software that I ever touched, no matter what it edits, images, video, audio, had me baffled about some of decisions, small and big. For my own sanity I just accepted it as a part of life, like a bad weather.
There are definitely a lot of little things in gimp that make it hard. The lack of a shapetool is one(yes yes it’s not a drawing app but a basic edition helps) and other things like adding text with a black outline or shadow. After literally decades they finally added in a way to make it easier to image macro text in. The old way involved several submenus and I know I couldnt figure it out on my own without a guide.
I know sometimes people come into an opensource ecosystem and complain that everything is worse because they arent used to it, but at the same time there are a lot of open source programs that are very rough around the edges and the developer cant see it because they know the program inside and out so of course it’s intuitive that this feature is burried in here and this feature way in there.
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.
Not necessarily, but humans are creatures of habit. If your app doesn’t follow existing patterns, you better have a good reason for it.
It is true however that UX research is pretty poor on Linux, outside of say Gnome, but I think Linux apps could also take notes from market leaders and see what works from them and why.
It’s not always just a spreadsheet comparison of features, it’s considering the UX for different screens and user journeys and comparing them to one another.
I disagree, they’ve got a consistent UX framework across the board, inputs are clear, navigation is the same across gdk apps. Is it consistent with other DEs? Not quite. But all gnome apps are easy to use, have pleasing UIs and generally share patterns that make it easy to see them as part of the same family even if an app is third party.
I agree on consistency. It does have vision and it is consistently implemented.
It has different problems. It doesn’t play well with apps written not for it, it doesn’t allow for a good deal of customisation, and full of bugs and questionable decisions. All the UI stuff is subjective, but bugs and unresponsiveness isn’t.
Eh can’t really blame it for not being more open I think to customisation, it is an issue but not really a UX one I think. Any UI could be faulted for that then, not being customisable enough. As for apps not written for it again, not something they have control over. Could say the same about any DE, or even Mac or windows when they use non standard blocks
What else could it be if not UX. Not being able to setup a shortcut for the keyboard layout change without a bunch of bullshit hoops is an eXperience I have as a User.
Any UI could be faulted for that then
Yes, it’s a metric by which we measure the experience. Sometimes things should and could be easily customisable, and if they aren’t, it’s a fault of the UI.
As for apps not written for it again, not something they have control over
If they’re making a window manager, they need to consider apps that user might run with this window manager. If for example a browser doesn’t render half of the internet correctly because they added an unexpected rendering conventions, it’s a shit browser. Same could be said about desktop environment.
Other DE expected to run apps, Gnome expects that you write your app with Gnome in mind, that’s a big difference.
That’s what I mean. You used photoshop professionally, you are used to its interface, you want everything to have the same interface so you don’t have to learn a new one. It’s normal, we all are like that. The problems start when you try to hide it behind words like “intuitive”, “industry standart”, and “good for everyone”
say what you will about adobe and you might be right, but photoshop was perfected over years for an efficient pro workflow, and the industry coalesced around how similar software works.
to the point GIMP is not an effective tool. I would excuse them for trying to make it actually “intuitive”, but as it stands, its neither “industry standard”, nor “good for everyone”.
this is my point. wanna come up with something better? please do, but its not close.
But that’s like you know, your opinion, man.
What Photoshop is, is a more feature-full app, that’s fore sure, but all the claims of it being better at workflow only come from people who learned it already. It might be true, but it also could be Stockholm syndrome, there is no way to evaluate that, really. 20 years ago I was shit at coding, now I can do in an hour what I was able to do in a month back then. That’s because C++ perfected its workflow, and for no other reasons.
I am not a graphical guy, I only use Gimp for a number of limited uses, but I used it a lot for that, and I’m very efficient in what I do with it. If I open Photoshop, it will take me 20 times more time to do the same. But I know for a fact it’s not because of some inherent beterness of one over the other.
i used to literally use it for work. its not just my own opinion, and its slightly supported.
of course the landscape could have changed in the meantime, but that was the consensus among professionals at the time. you couldn’t send your delivery with anything other than a .psd, and gimp must have that success if we are to use it in lieau of other foss tools like krita at least.
i want things to be better in that respect and i know gimp has the potential to disrupt the crappy status quo if it had a better ui.
I guessed that, and that was the point of my comment. It’s impossible to tell, do you and your fellow professionals like it better, or did you just got used to it so much and don’t want to learn a new one. It’s not impossible to imagine - because it happens frequently - that there is an app with measurably better UI, that people don’t want to adopt. I’m not saying Gimp is that, personally I think all of them are terrible, all in their own unique way, and I don’t know if it’s possible to make a good one for this application.
When I worked as a sysadmin, I saw this happening all the fucking time. Hundreds of people prefer doing something in 50 clicks instead of using a new app that allows doing the same in 10, because previous way is ingrained in their muscle memory, and they absolutely, positively convinced that the old way is strictly unmistakably better, and they would fight me with deadly force so they could retain their old ways.
After that, I really don’t believe in people’s objectivity when it comes to that. I don’t think people can tell what is “better UI”.
it doesn’t ultimately matter. i see neither a “user friendly” nor a “industry standard” UI on GIMP.
i’m also a sysdmin now, who sees the same tendencies as you just described, and have GIMP installed for an honest retry at 3.0. i have also studied UX as part of the formation i used to need photoshop for.
what it needs is for users and devs to stop being so stubborn about it and recognize its faults, and do like the Blender people did. its not good as it is, and people will keep wondering why everyone hates it until the status quo on it changes drastically.
its a shame because its very good software underneath the bad UX.
When are language models gonna be able to help there - a couple are doing such a good job regurgitating aesthetically acceptable draft web designs (stolen though they may be). They even figure out some logic along the way.
Anybody know of any existing LLM-driven UX enhancement plans on any open-source projects?
We’re talking about regular users having Linux as their operation system, not what happens under the hood of specialised machines. Steam machine user doesn’t run Linux, they run Steam.
What I mean, they don’t interact with the OS. They only interact with Steam app, and it basically doesn’t matter what it runs underneath. When we’re talking about users adopting Linux it doesn’t count.
That sounds like the majority of users. I’m trying to think of how many times I needed to “use Linux”.
I interact with Firefox, IntelliJ, and a few other applications and IntelliJ hides all of the CLI so I don’t have to know git, and I don’t have to know where my files are.
My mother wouldn’t know how to install a driver in Windows, or even how to navigate to a file in Explorer. Does that mean she isn’t a Windows user?
I think you are being overly pessimistic about what counts as a user.
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.
Its close but when gnome is still saying “lmao bro you’re supposed to know how to use terminal to make empty files bro” and “nonono you are too stupid for mmb paste toggle” in the same breath, it will be a while.
Mmb to paste is a simple, easy to understand option that is a simple preference that some people might like. But it’s locked away for no reason. It served as an example on how out of touch gnome philosophy is.
Nonesense. There is no easier to use and more functional desktop with great user experience than Linux. Been that way a long time. People are just used to poor UX and want more of it.
Edit: I would love to hear from the downvoters how windows, with its constantly changing interface, ads, poor file manager and poorly thought out workflow design is somehow better than linux. And stick with win 11 as that is the standard now.
As for Mac, talk about confusing. Where are your files? What is happening at full screen, what menu is doing what? I will say macs are great when you get used it, especially if you use keyboard shortcuts.
More downvotes for the truth. I have taken people who have barely used a computer before and tried them on Linux or windows. Windows is always a mess and does things in unsuspected ways or is missing a basic feature.
Linux works just fine, and out of the box from any current distro the environments are pretty much ready to go. That is just the truth.
There are five different file pickers on my system and I never know which application uses which one, or if my bookmarks will appear in them, or if the dialog will respect theming or display icons from a light theme on a dark background. Speaking of theming, it’s a shitshow. QT and GTK apps never look even similar, and the existence of Adwaita isn’t helping. If you want a flatpak app to use your preferred cursor, you have to manually grant it access to additional paths, then it’s a 50/50 chance. There is massive feature fragmentation between Wayland compositors, especially with GNOME, the “user-friendly one” dragging its feet (pun intended). We didn’t even have a functional on-screen keyboard until recently in Plasma. Xorg wasn’t any better – you had to choose between high input latency (compositor on) or massive screen tearing (compositor off), and it was a maintenance nightmare. But let’s not forget about audio either: the first time I tried to switch to Linux ~2016, I could never get PulseAudio to work reliably.
These are only the issues I’ve personally come across. I’m sure others could add to the list. Having a preference of desktops is fine and I would never deprive you of that right, but saying that the Linux desktop experience across the board is “easier to use and more functional” than everything else, and especially claiming it has “been for a long time”, is untrue, and fucking stupid. That’s why you’re getting downvoted.
And don’t you think I didn’t notice how you never actually presented any arguments for your claims.
There are five different file pickers on my system and I never know which application uses which one, or if my bookmarks will appear in them, or if the dialog will respect theming or display icons from a light theme on a dark background
I have a rolling desktop for the past 5 years and a laptop installed for the past one year on a stable release. I have none of that. Bookmarks? What do you mean by bookmarks and file browsers? I will agree that in some applications the GTK save dialogs while looking the same, do have a different sort order. But guess what? Windows does this too depending on the application.
QT and GTK apps never look even similar, and the existence of Adwaita isn’t helping.
Mine are pretty much the same, cant really tell the difference.
If you want a flatpak app to use your preferred cursor, you have to manually grant it access to additional paths, then it’s a 50/50 chance.
Never seen that before. Cursor stays the same. Again, you can add packages to windows that has similar issues.
We didn’t even have a functional on-screen keyboard until recently in Plasma.
That may be true, I don’t know. You think the average user is going to want an on-screen keyboard? Either way Plasma has one now.
2016 - 9 years ago you had issues with Pulse Audio? I guess I have had a few over the last 20. But Windows did as well. Hell my net work card on my laptop was half speed on windows 14 years ago, when in linux it worked fine.
I stand by what I said. You can make windows a shit show as well, hell the Windows pushed nvidia driver update this summer to friends computer meant all games go to black screen. Had to unsintall drivers, do a regedit, a little powershell and it was back. Yeah that was fun. Point is you can bork any computer.
I have done nothing with this laptop I am typing on except update it and add software. Everything is sensible: packages are organized. Files are were I want them and put them. Unlike windows I have a consistent and easy to use settings tool. I have a package “store” that also unlike windows doesnt try and override my choices.
There are no ads, no XBOX live icon that wont go away without hidden settings, no push to get me to a new account online just to use my computer, no regedit and powershell fuckery needed, no uninstall issues where if I deleted the package that created it, it wont go away. There is no co-pilot and AI crap, no MSN on the front page of my browser, no attempt to force me to use any particular browser. There is no double deep right click menus in my file manager and I have the choice of icons words or both on my dialogs. I don’t go to one settings tool and end up in a completely different one as I am making choices, like windows does. I can copy paste nearly every thing I see on screen in those dialogs too.
All the workflows are sensible. Clipboard that works out of the box and has memory, a better mouse pad with three and two finger consistency. File manager can drag and drop everywhere. Everything I do in windows is extra steps and a bit later: WHY!?
And the most important part? Everytime I take someone who really has never used a comptuer, windows confuses them. Linux confuses them too, but not nearly as much. They get it, they know what to click on and get things done in a fairly short amount of time.
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.
Downplaying the importance of UX is one of the reasons the year of the Linux desktop still has not arrived.
If by importance of UX you mean “your program should look and behave exactly like this other program made by a corpo, because I’ve learned that one already”.
In reality The Year Of The Linux might never arrive, it doesn’t have a multibillion corporation spending multi billions in order to make Linux a default software on every computer you buy. (to pedants: Android doesn’t count)
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/
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.
Not in the example we’re talking about though. Photoshop isn’t simple, nothing in it is. And for the software that is, it doesn’t mean you can’t come up with the better UX. We shouldn’t discourage people from trying to invent something better just because it isn’t what we already have.
I believe when majority of people saying “Photoshop has this, we should do this as well” are not actually saying GIMP should create a total carbon-copy.
People loves easy to use interface, not carbon copy of Photoshop, even if they don’t say that. They just don’t know how to articulate their frustration better.
When Affinity Photo emerges as actual Photoshop alternative, no one complains regarding “not being Photoshop clone” because the interface is actually easier than Photoshop, while still being advanced software.
New GIMP user complaining about interface “not being Photoshop clone” is indicator that GIMP interface is not easy to use and intuitive enough.
Great insight Nasi!!
And I see with my own eyes how some people are saying exactly that. Sometimes they wrap it into something like “photoshop is intuitive industry standard that takes zero seconds to learn and everyone is born with perfect understanding of it, and everything that isn’t that is an affront to god and actively violates all my senses”. I’m paraphrasing a bit.
That’s why I said “majority of people.”
There’s always small group of people that prefer certain software and refuse to change, they might even hate when the software gets updated. Heck, some people even still use obsolete creative softwares despite the development company is dead for almost 20 years.
I don’t know what majority of people think. To be fair, you also don’t know that. We can only guess
I conclude that as I’ve been helping people setting their computer as well as teaching people to use various softwares for 15 years :)
I always try to know what things they want to do and their skill level, then recommending software that might be suitable for them. It can be proprietary, but most of the time I tried to recommend FOSS alternative instead.
Ehhh flexibility is a good feature to have, but it’s not a requirement for good UX. Good UX should work for both beginner and advanced users, whether you do that through a single UI, different presets, or customizable panels depends on the use case and features available. A good music player for example doesn’t need a highly flexible UI to have good UX.
If anything, a good UX should know what tools people use most and how the rest of the market does theirs to have something that’s transferrable but also that works well with your feature set and brand vision
I’m talking flexible UI as relative to Clip Studio Paint.
The software is now an industry standard for manga, webtoon, 2D animation, and general ACG-related illustration in Asia. It was so good that there’s no other alternative that have it. Not even Photoshop or Krita.
I read that Krita dev also agree that it will be nice to have it.
There’s a ton of unique workflow only be possible with it.
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
For three years I worked teaching computers to adults, and for four years I was a system administrator/helpdesk for a big office.
I can absolutely assure you, from my experience, there is nothing inheritly easier or harder to figure out in close source software vs foss, in windows vs linux, in gui vs console, in Photoshop vs Gimp.
The only difference is, what did a person encountered before. The idea that you can give a person photoshop and they will draw you a sold shape, but you give the same person gimp and they will not be able to never stood up to my experience with probably thousands of people.
I for one have never used Photoshop but I used to use Gimp occasionally for some semi-technical markup and annotation. I remember being baffled by how to make a hollow circle, as opposed to a solid one. I kept forgetting the process so I had to look it up every time. Nowadays I just use canva since I don’t want to analyse menus and tool options every time. I don’t have to use Photoshop to say that Gimp’s UI can be better. Anyway, I also use Audacity extensively and although it’s not as outstanding of a case as Gimp, the older versions were a pain, nowadays it’s much better but still plenty to improve (I have not used other audio editing softwares)
Then again I learn software by intuition and exploring menus (rarely I go to read the manual, as do majority of the people I imagine), if I was taught how to use it by someone like you, maybe things would be different, but I doubt that’s how most people interact with software.
Every editing software that I ever touched, no matter what it edits, images, video, audio, had me baffled about some of decisions, small and big. For my own sanity I just accepted it as a part of life, like a bad weather.
There are definitely a lot of little things in gimp that make it hard. The lack of a shapetool is one(yes yes it’s not a drawing app but a basic edition helps) and other things like adding text with a black outline or shadow. After literally decades they finally added in a way to make it easier to image macro text in. The old way involved several submenus and I know I couldnt figure it out on my own without a guide.
I know sometimes people come into an opensource ecosystem and complain that everything is worse because they arent used to it, but at the same time there are a lot of open source programs that are very rough around the edges and the developer cant see it because they know the program inside and out so of course it’s intuitive that this feature is burried in here and this feature way in there.
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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.
Now you’re just saying words.
Not necessarily, but humans are creatures of habit. If your app doesn’t follow existing patterns, you better have a good reason for it.
It is true however that UX research is pretty poor on Linux, outside of say Gnome, but I think Linux apps could also take notes from market leaders and see what works from them and why.
It’s not always just a spreadsheet comparison of features, it’s considering the UX for different screens and user journeys and comparing them to one another.
You kidding me? Gnome has the worst UX of them all. The UI is kind of OK, but the UX is fucked beyound repair.
I disagree, they’ve got a consistent UX framework across the board, inputs are clear, navigation is the same across gdk apps. Is it consistent with other DEs? Not quite. But all gnome apps are easy to use, have pleasing UIs and generally share patterns that make it easy to see them as part of the same family even if an app is third party.
I agree on consistency. It does have vision and it is consistently implemented.
It has different problems. It doesn’t play well with apps written not for it, it doesn’t allow for a good deal of customisation, and full of bugs and questionable decisions. All the UI stuff is subjective, but bugs and unresponsiveness isn’t.
Eh can’t really blame it for not being more open I think to customisation, it is an issue but not really a UX one I think. Any UI could be faulted for that then, not being customisable enough. As for apps not written for it again, not something they have control over. Could say the same about any DE, or even Mac or windows when they use non standard blocks
What else could it be if not UX. Not being able to setup a shortcut for the keyboard layout change without a bunch of bullshit hoops is an eXperience I have as a User.
Yes, it’s a metric by which we measure the experience. Sometimes things should and could be easily customisable, and if they aren’t, it’s a fault of the UI.
If they’re making a window manager, they need to consider apps that user might run with this window manager. If for example a browser doesn’t render half of the internet correctly because they added an unexpected rendering conventions, it’s a shit browser. Same could be said about desktop environment.
Other DE expected to run apps, Gnome expects that you write your app with Gnome in mind, that’s a big difference.
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.
That’s what I mean. You used photoshop professionally, you are used to its interface, you want everything to have the same interface so you don’t have to learn a new one. It’s normal, we all are like that. The problems start when you try to hide it behind words like “intuitive”, “industry standart”, and “good for everyone”
say what you will about adobe and you might be right, but photoshop was perfected over years for an efficient pro workflow, and the industry coalesced around how similar software works.
to the point GIMP is not an effective tool. I would excuse them for trying to make it actually “intuitive”, but as it stands, its neither “industry standard”, nor “good for everyone”.
this is my point. wanna come up with something better? please do, but its not close.
But that’s like you know, your opinion, man.
What Photoshop is, is a more feature-full app, that’s fore sure, but all the claims of it being better at workflow only come from people who learned it already. It might be true, but it also could be Stockholm syndrome, there is no way to evaluate that, really. 20 years ago I was shit at coding, now I can do in an hour what I was able to do in a month back then. That’s because C++ perfected its workflow, and for no other reasons.
I am not a graphical guy, I only use Gimp for a number of limited uses, but I used it a lot for that, and I’m very efficient in what I do with it. If I open Photoshop, it will take me 20 times more time to do the same. But I know for a fact it’s not because of some inherent beterness of one over the other.
i used to literally use it for work. its not just my own opinion, and its slightly supported.
of course the landscape could have changed in the meantime, but that was the consensus among professionals at the time. you couldn’t send your delivery with anything other than a .psd, and gimp must have that success if we are to use it in lieau of other foss tools like krita at least.
i want things to be better in that respect and i know gimp has the potential to disrupt the crappy status quo if it had a better ui.
I guessed that, and that was the point of my comment. It’s impossible to tell, do you and your fellow professionals like it better, or did you just got used to it so much and don’t want to learn a new one. It’s not impossible to imagine - because it happens frequently - that there is an app with measurably better UI, that people don’t want to adopt. I’m not saying Gimp is that, personally I think all of them are terrible, all in their own unique way, and I don’t know if it’s possible to make a good one for this application.
When I worked as a sysadmin, I saw this happening all the fucking time. Hundreds of people prefer doing something in 50 clicks instead of using a new app that allows doing the same in 10, because previous way is ingrained in their muscle memory, and they absolutely, positively convinced that the old way is strictly unmistakably better, and they would fight me with deadly force so they could retain their old ways.
After that, I really don’t believe in people’s objectivity when it comes to that. I don’t think people can tell what is “better UI”.
it doesn’t ultimately matter. i see neither a “user friendly” nor a “industry standard” UI on GIMP.
i’m also a sysdmin now, who sees the same tendencies as you just described, and have GIMP installed for an honest retry at 3.0. i have also studied UX as part of the formation i used to need photoshop for.
what it needs is for users and devs to stop being so stubborn about it and recognize its faults, and do like the Blender people did. its not good as it is, and people will keep wondering why everyone hates it until the status quo on it changes drastically.
its a shame because its very good software underneath the bad UX.
When are language models gonna be able to help there - a couple are doing such a good job regurgitating aesthetically acceptable draft web designs (stolen though they may be). They even figure out some logic along the way.
Anybody know of any existing LLM-driven UX enhancement plans on any open-source projects?
thats more a lack of people to do the things we need to be done problem, than some secret formula of how to make good UX.
LLMs won’t help here, we need an attitude shift away from excusing GIMP just because its FOSS, and the money/manpower to execute it.
if the good folks at Blender did it, we can do it too if we really wanted to.
Yep. I use Gimp, digiKam and Darktable for literally decades now. I am utterly lost on Adobe software.
Valve sells all of its computers with Linux on it, no?
They don’t sell all-purpose computers, they sell gaming systems that run Linux underneath. The regular user never has to interact with the OS
They also don’t sell that many of them.
Some quick googling says that Valve has sold nearly 4 million decks, which is pretty good.
Lenovo sold ~62 million computers last year alone. And they only make up ~1/4 of global market share
I guess all valve has to do is release steam machines again and then what? Suddenly the year of the Linux desktop isn’t here?
We’re talking about regular users having Linux as their operation system, not what happens under the hood of specialised machines. Steam machine user doesn’t run Linux, they run Steam.
Ah you’re right, it just cannot happen with a steam machine.
Linux is a kernel. They run Linux.
Or do you mean “they don’t run KDE/Gnome/LXDE”?
What I mean, they don’t interact with the OS. They only interact with Steam app, and it basically doesn’t matter what it runs underneath. When we’re talking about users adopting Linux it doesn’t count.
That sounds like the majority of users. I’m trying to think of how many times I needed to “use Linux”.
I interact with Firefox, IntelliJ, and a few other applications and IntelliJ hides all of the CLI so I don’t have to know git, and I don’t have to know where my files are.
My mother wouldn’t know how to install a driver in Windows, or even how to navigate to a file in Explorer. Does that mean she isn’t a Windows user?
I think you are being overly pessimistic about what counts as a user.
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.
We’re talking about home computers, regular users running their personal OS.
Its close but when gnome is still saying “lmao bro you’re supposed to know how to use terminal to make empty files bro” and “nonono you are too stupid for mmb paste toggle” in the same breath, it will be a while.
The average user doesn’t need empty files
Also
What’s the issue with this
Out of touch.
Mmb to paste is a simple, easy to understand option that is a simple preference that some people might like. But it’s locked away for no reason. It served as an example on how out of touch gnome philosophy is.
Did you just seriously say the average user doesn’t need to make empty files?
When do they?
At the lowest they are making text files
Nonesense. There is no easier to use and more functional desktop with great user experience than Linux. Been that way a long time. People are just used to poor UX and want more of it.
Edit: I would love to hear from the downvoters how windows, with its constantly changing interface, ads, poor file manager and poorly thought out workflow design is somehow better than linux. And stick with win 11 as that is the standard now.
As for Mac, talk about confusing. Where are your files? What is happening at full screen, what menu is doing what? I will say macs are great when you get used it, especially if you use keyboard shortcuts.
More downvotes for the truth. I have taken people who have barely used a computer before and tried them on Linux or windows. Windows is always a mess and does things in unsuspected ways or is missing a basic feature.
Linux works just fine, and out of the box from any current distro the environments are pretty much ready to go. That is just the truth.
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.
True. But each of them are more or less polished enough for any user.
I mean pick one.
Give me the argument that this isn’t true.
There are five different file pickers on my system and I never know which application uses which one, or if my bookmarks will appear in them, or if the dialog will respect theming or display icons from a light theme on a dark background. Speaking of theming, it’s a shitshow. QT and GTK apps never look even similar, and the existence of Adwaita isn’t helping. If you want a flatpak app to use your preferred cursor, you have to manually grant it access to additional paths, then it’s a 50/50 chance. There is massive feature fragmentation between Wayland compositors, especially with GNOME, the “user-friendly one” dragging its feet (pun intended). We didn’t even have a functional on-screen keyboard until recently in Plasma. Xorg wasn’t any better – you had to choose between high input latency (compositor on) or massive screen tearing (compositor off), and it was a maintenance nightmare. But let’s not forget about audio either: the first time I tried to switch to Linux ~2016, I could never get PulseAudio to work reliably.
These are only the issues I’ve personally come across. I’m sure others could add to the list. Having a preference of desktops is fine and I would never deprive you of that right, but saying that the Linux desktop experience across the board is “easier to use and more functional” than everything else, and especially claiming it has “been for a long time”, is untrue, and fucking stupid. That’s why you’re getting downvoted.
And don’t you think I didn’t notice how you never actually presented any arguments for your claims.
I have a rolling desktop for the past 5 years and a laptop installed for the past one year on a stable release. I have none of that. Bookmarks? What do you mean by bookmarks and file browsers? I will agree that in some applications the GTK save dialogs while looking the same, do have a different sort order. But guess what? Windows does this too depending on the application.
Mine are pretty much the same, cant really tell the difference.
Never seen that before. Cursor stays the same. Again, you can add packages to windows that has similar issues.
That may be true, I don’t know. You think the average user is going to want an on-screen keyboard? Either way Plasma has one now.
2016 - 9 years ago you had issues with Pulse Audio? I guess I have had a few over the last 20. But Windows did as well. Hell my net work card on my laptop was half speed on windows 14 years ago, when in linux it worked fine.
I stand by what I said. You can make windows a shit show as well, hell the Windows pushed nvidia driver update this summer to friends computer meant all games go to black screen. Had to unsintall drivers, do a regedit, a little powershell and it was back. Yeah that was fun. Point is you can bork any computer.
I have done nothing with this laptop I am typing on except update it and add software. Everything is sensible: packages are organized. Files are were I want them and put them. Unlike windows I have a consistent and easy to use settings tool. I have a package “store” that also unlike windows doesnt try and override my choices.
There are no ads, no XBOX live icon that wont go away without hidden settings, no push to get me to a new account online just to use my computer, no regedit and powershell fuckery needed, no uninstall issues where if I deleted the package that created it, it wont go away. There is no co-pilot and AI crap, no MSN on the front page of my browser, no attempt to force me to use any particular browser. There is no double deep right click menus in my file manager and I have the choice of icons words or both on my dialogs. I don’t go to one settings tool and end up in a completely different one as I am making choices, like windows does. I can copy paste nearly every thing I see on screen in those dialogs too.
All the workflows are sensible. Clipboard that works out of the box and has memory, a better mouse pad with three and two finger consistency. File manager can drag and drop everywhere. Everything I do in windows is extra steps and a bit later: WHY!?
And the most important part? Everytime I take someone who really has never used a comptuer, windows confuses them. Linux confuses them too, but not nearly as much. They get it, they know what to click on and get things done in a fairly short amount of time.
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I’ve used MacOS for about 20 years, and it’s a shit show. But…
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”.
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’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’m sure having all computers in existence come by default with window and offering free stuff to students has nothing to do with it.
/s
Naaah, it’s just companies like Adobe, Autodesk and Microsoft shitting on Linux users each time they can.
Lol