I agree with that.
Lets not throw all FLOSS to one bag
Talking about Gimp. I'm a long term user of Photoshop and Gimp, also someone involved in Gimp development. I would say that Gimp development is similar to Leadwerks 3, at least we are trying to and it is one of our goals
Gimp is definitely a bit behind in some areas, but I dare to say that it's not as bad as many say. I use this software for few hours a day and at the end of day I have my job done with a pleasure.
So why Gimp has so bad opinion about user experience?
Many users (not all) want free PS clone and Gimp is not PS clone. Gimp is Gimp We do our own software and we are NOT alternative NOR enemy of Photoshop. Most of Gimp users don't understand that.
Many users fight against software, they don't even care to try understand workflow design behind a tool. Gimp is for professional artists that understand core mechanics of image creation and manipulation, so they know how to work with it and have to work with it on big projects. Most users lack needed knowledge and blame software for it. Gimp is just too hard to use for casual users, not because it's bad design, reason is that advanced image manipulation is a hard topic in a first place. Casual users should use software designed for casual users for example Paint.NET or Pinta, many users don't understand it.
Echos of old battles - "Gimp is bad because it is not in single window" but it was good for Linux where we have virtual desktops. Many users wanted single window, but as many wanted multi window. It was long battle on arguments, so after advises form professional UI/UX designer that we work with - yes we work with usability designers. Single window mode was developed with a switch to old style multi windowing + extra docking features so it is easier to manage workplace.
Gimp development is slow, it's not because we are lazy we don't have enough people and those that we have don't have enough spare time to work on our huge TODO list in rapid fashion. Most of this list is about user experience, or usability fixes At the same time we are now moving to new long made powerful core, that will bring very important features and will have tremendous impact on user experience - one of them is non linear editing.
Next time you see user bashing Gimp, Blender or other software take his words with grain of salt. It's only "normal" everyday bad PR.
Leadwerks has this problem too, but on much smaller scale and I know that it has from reading this forum "Give me that OSOM features from magazines pictures and I will buy your software". We have the same topics, just change "buy" to "use for free without giving anything back, even bug reports, I will go with them directly to blogs or useless forums where you wont see how I blame you for making ****-software". I stumbled many times on this kind of situations, when <place name of the project>user "wanabe" is barking at the wrong tree
I see here many real Leadwerks users, who truly use it and they love to use it and because of that and only because of that, they see it's real weak points, so as community they try to solve them. One of reasons I'm interested in Leadworks is because it's developers and users as a community are close.
Josh main developer and CEO is writing directly to it's users and he reads what they write to him. This is how it should be everywhere!
We do the same in Gimp project but I don't know why it's much, much, harder to find users truly aware of the software they are using and ready to help make it better, users as Leadwerks have, or Blender.
We don't need Gimp fanboys wee need real Gimp users.
So that's why Gimp is where it is now, because we lack man power on developer and user side. That's what truly means being alone in a crowd and Gimp crowd is BIG and noisy believe me, I know.
Good that not all Gimp users are like that and I wish Leadwerks as many great users as it can handle!
