I tried. I really tried to like GIMP. The main reason I don't like it is because it's trying so hard to be a professional picture editor and the UI.

Why can't I deselect things? Why does something need to be selected at all times? Let me just click a button and remove the selection outline and deselect things.

No. I won't help the dev team because I can't code to save my ass. I turn wrenchs and fix things for a living.

I use other, simpler pic editors. Why should I learn to fly a Boeing 747 when a Cessna 172 will get me where I need to go? I'm making a shit post once every three months, not professional art.

GIMP is bad. If the problem was simply that it was "different to PS" then other apps like Krita and Affinity Photo would have the same reputation.

If a user goes looking for a tool or feature and it's not in the first place they look, that's a problem of "didn't really practice that much". If experienced people need to look up how to do basic operations and their reaction is "that's fucking stupid", then the software is bad.

To then say "well why don't you help the Dev team then" is insane. I'm not spending hundreds of hours digging GIMP out of bad design decisions when I could just use better software and I haven't seen any evidence that my PR would even be accepted.

Nobody needs excuses and apologism, they need Blender for image editing and GIMP just isn't that.

'help the dev team' is a lunatics response. I use Linux but fuck the users man.

I'm just glad they added non destructive editing in the latest version. I've tried to rotate/resize something in gimp before and it was a chore to keep quality acceptable.

I think what burns people the most is that after Photoshop 5 or so, GIMP stopped keeping up with all the improvements in the later Photoshop versions. People making the jump from 2024 Photoshop to 1996 Photoshop UI/UX are gonna have a bad time.

Edit: as a software developer I can say that I've never seen a user more frustrated, sometimes even irrationally so, when they are forced to re-learn muscle memory to perform a familiar task. I've also seen people practically riot at the mere suggestion that this will happen. If you wish to curry favor with your userbase, never ever, remove keyboard accelerators, move toolbars around, break workflow, etc.

I know it's a consequence of open source development, but I just absolutely despise the file picker. Everything else is dreamy.

Had to learn Gimp in 4th or 6th grade, not sire which one it was, pretty comfortable with it, though I admit, it can be frustrating sometimes.

work very intuitively

I only ever used gimp

maybe its because of the thing where you select something and try moving it and it moves the whole layer? thats the only thing ive ever had a problem with in gimp

It takes a while to figure out how selections in Gimp work.

It whenever you select you have created a mask and when you combine it with layers it can get very confusing.

If you accidentally select a small bit you cannot edit anything else. I think that is what OP is referring to.

There is a tool that shows you what you have selected that can help.

IMO Gimp isn’t very well documented so you can get stuck for a while before you understand what is going on.

yeah, that's the point of the joke. You'd think that the "default state" should be "select all" -- I want to edit the entire layer, so I should select all of it. But no, "select all" has a bunch of weird obscure behaviour, "select none" is what you want most of the time, even though it gets the shortcut with more keys.

My man GIMP is the only software I've ever seen that doesn't use CTRL+D for deselect