this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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GIMP is hot garbage compared to classic Photoshop (I haven't used the rent-seeking versions so I wouldn't know about those). The UX has been utter shite and will remain utter shite because they like it that way. PhotoGIMP has been a godsend.
What did you try to do that you found confusing or difficult? I’m genuinely just curious.
Exhibit A: the text tool.
In general though, I find the UX to just be worse across the board. Too many steps. Non-intuitive defaults. Bad keyboard shortcuts. and so on.
To be honest, I have successfully avoided using bare GIMP for enough years now (not sure how old PhotoGIMP is, but I think it's been around at least 5 years) that the specific bad memories are fading.
I do think GIMP has objectively bad UX in the sense that it's definitely not just "I was used to Photoshop first so I automatically think everything else sucks." Probably the last ~20 years of flamewars started by people pissing off the devs by saying the exact same thing is some evidence of that. But I'm not a UX expert and haven't sat down to do a side-by-side comparison... honestly, that's something I'd really enjoy reading/watching if somebody did do it.
If such a thing existed, it'd be coolest if they did it with one of the "good" versions of classic Photoshop, like version 7 or whatever was made by pirates into a portable app in the 2000s. I have no idea how far the UX has evolved in Adobe's rent-seeking era because I stopped using even portable Photoshop when I switched to Linux as my daily driver for good in 2015 or so. Then suffered with GIMP for a few years, hating every nanosecond of it, til PhotoGIMP came along.
Oh... yeah, you're not wrong.
You're also not wrong that the GIMP developers stubbornly refusing to create something like this as the normal way of doing things is evidence of them not really caring about how well their software works out for most people who are going to use it.
If you needed some more evidence, holy shit the scripting interface is bad. However bad you think it is, multiply that by about 3 to 5 times, and that's how bad it is. I'm not trying to talk trash on people who made something awesome which I use frequently which does the job I need it to do perfectly (and were fine with making it available for PhotoGIMP to take advantage of to make some different thing to serve other people's need). But holy shit the scripting is bad. It's so bad.