For what i heard, a lot of people on the Linux community use Krita for image manipulation, even though, it’s intended for digital painting, and GIMP is the one intended for image manipulation, because people don’t like the GIMP’s UI.
My issue is, i never understood why they don’t like the GIMP’s UI, since i never have issues with it,(Although it’s probably because i’m used to the UI) so i need to adress this problem and ask you What does the GIMP UI has that you don’t like or hate so much and why you like Krita’s UI over GIMP’s?
Before you event comment your answer i need to ask you to do the following:
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Address each specific issue along with an concise and direct explanation of why you don’t like it
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Answers such as “I just don’t like it”, “I don’t like where it’s placed” or anything alike doesn’t count as “Concise and Direct”, we are adults, not 4 year old children.
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If you can provide a suggestion of how GIMP’s UI can be improved, it would help a lot, and maybe this issue can be solved.
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If someone else commented something you were about to comment, upvote them, this way we can address the most common issues effectively.
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I need you to watch the screenshots of both UI’s, because something that most people don’t know, it’s how similar Krita and GIMP’s UIs are.
Krita’s UI
GIMP’s UI
(Credits to a friend of mine for lettig me use the screenshots.)
My ideas on how GIMP can improve it’s UI
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Adding the option of the new UI selected by default, but with the possibility to switch to the new UI.
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Possibly addding “work spaces” like Krita would help too, along with the possibility of exporting and importing them, this way people can have custom arrangements of the UI according to the kind of work they will do.
Thanks for reading and hopefully we can address this issue effectively.
Now admittedly I’m not someone who often uses drawing programs, but my biggest issue in GIMP is that I never seem to be able to find what I’m looking for.
In the two images you posted you can actually see an example of such a case. In Krita all the tools (or whatever you’d call them) in the bar on the left are ordered in a logical way, and separate types of tools are also visually separated by separator lines. The bar with tools is also only 2 icons wide, which makes scanning for the right tool a bit easier, since you can mostly just scan along the vertical axis. In GIMP it’s just a pile of low contrast icons in seemingly random order. Unless you’ve used it enough to know the order, you’re gonna have to do a lot more searching. And searching will be way harder since you’ll have to search horizontally and vertically.
It’s like reading a website where the text is taking the whole with of the screen and without paragraphs (GIMP) vs reading a website where the line length is constrained, the text is horizontally centered, and there are proper paragraphs.
I feel like this example reflects my personal experience with both. I’ve used quite a few different types of image editing programs, and with most of them I can fairly easily find the stuff I need. Using GIMP however, I used to be quite lost. Nowadays it’s gotten better because the windows are not all floating around and I’ve used it more. But still, I only found Krita after using a fair bit of GIMP, and yet I felt instantly more at home because the UI was easier to navigate.
Edit: That being said, GIMP is a very cool program. I don’t want to hate on it too much. It’s helped me countless times. The UI has already improved a lot since the floaty window days, and I hope that continues.
For me all the things you said about GIMP, but my biggest issue is how layers work in it. It is totally unintuitive to me. Last week I tried to edit some simple image in GIMP, basically pasting some small objects and touching them up. I couldn’t get it to work properly, and would probably have redone it in Photoshop if it was to be used by more than three people for a short period.
you can
That’s the key. can. It needs to not suck by default. If people have to tweak the program to be usable first then nobody’s going to want to use your program.
The deal is, it’s not mine, it’s a Libre Software, so it belongs to everyone, not just me.
Can, but not by default. The default setup is what leaves an impression on most users. Most users opening GIMP for the first time expect to be able to find stuff that they need, not have to first spend a lot of time getting familiar with all of its options. It shouldn’t be needed to first spend time opening all the sane default windows and re-aliging stuff every time you boot it for the first time. At least, that shouldn’t be the case of GIMP wants to be as popular with non-technical users like Krita is.
Also, the tool bar still doesn’t have the nice separations between tool functions, and it still feel a bit more chaotic. Not sure of it’s the icons or the order.
It’s not what the buttons look like, it’s what they do. In Krita, making an ellipse involves clicking the ellipse button and dragging it somewhere. You now have an ellipse, and you hold shift if you want to make it a circle instead.
In GIMP there is no direct ellipse tool, there’s only an ellipse select tool, likewise you hold shift to make it a circle. Then you use a menu item to select the border of your selection, getting a popup to let you determine how much pixels you want. And then, you use the fill tool or fill menu item to fill it. That’s a surprising amount of clicks to accomplish what’s most likely the single most common task for anyone opening a screenshot in an image editor. I’m not aware of any easier/faster method to do it. Feels like it should exist, but this is also what you get if you search for how to draw a circle in GIMP, so if it exists everyone’s missing it.
GIMP’s method gives you more power, but you rarely ever need that power. But when you do, Krita also has ellipse select, border select and various fill tools that can be strung together in the same way.
I’m just looking through this entire thread, and call me crazy, OP, but you seem angry not more people are using GIMP. You’re quite aggressive about it, attempting to shut down legitimate UI and UX concerns at every corner, and it is genuinely fatiguing to see.
Just saying, using Krita for Image Manipulation it’s like using a Driller to cut wood, that’s the wrong tool for the job.
UI is dated, for one.
range inputs can’t be scrolled, dragged around the screen, and are absurdly small on high DPI screens.
There’s a load of UX issues, such as how pasting content will create a new layer that is for some reason more limited than a typical layer.
Feature discoverability is poor. Most features are buried in years-old dropdown tabs that aren’t kept up to date with UI/UX expectations.
Some features are incredibly obtuse in how they explain themselves: selecting a brush dynamic selects stuff from a massive scrolling list with nothing but a title to explain what they do.
UI is inconsistent. Some elements are clearly older than others even after ““recent”” (years-old) updates.
There’s way more, btw. But honestly if this years-long push to get GIMP to GTK 3 has told me anything, it’s that the project should’ve canned the update years ago and written an entirely new app from scratch, dropping the technical debt, the archaic choice of language and UI toolkit, and they still would’ve come out with a new version faster than they have now.
How would writing an entire program be faster than upgrading an already fully functioning one ? I don’t see the logic ?
Because the underlying dependencies of GIMP changed a lot, especially between GTK2 and GTK3. It pulls resources from writing code to figuring out how to migrate code to a new version, usually as changes in the toolkit mean you may have to rewrite stuff anyway, which can mean more bugs or regressions in functionality which must be addressed.
Writing from scratch, you can write code that immediately fulfills the spec you’re working to (They could’ve even skipped straight to GTK4!) and used the old code as a reference of what’s needed for users whilst throwing out anything and everything else that isn’t strictly necessary.
It allows you to throw out old features and code that you had to work with in the past, but may not actually be used by anyone. If it WAS needed, it can be added later.
Most importantly, there’s little to no expectation that the new app will supersede the old one immediately, whereas during a toolkit migration you need to keep everything working for every release you do.
It’s like how building a new house can be faster than renovating an old historically-protected building to the same regulatory standard. There’s red tape, you have to work around old masonry and brickwork, you have to avoid damaging the building and keep its appearance the same. A new house may be different in looks and miss the old charm or familiarity, but it’ll be built faster, cheaper, and for the same price have more features to the old building.
Probably in a similar way to how USA and Canada are stuck with a two party government system and any attempts to remedy that haven’t been working out, but maybe if the country collapses under its own stupidity and the ultra wealthy run off with all the resources then the remaining people can struggle to survive with nothing left and die then… Oh wait…
You seem to have a pretty big monitor. Try it on a 13” laptop and you’ll see why it’s harder to use.
You can press the TAB button to temporarily hide all menus. It helps when working on small screens.
You can click the tool, configure it, then hit tab to work on the image. Then tab again to click on the new tool, tab, work on the image. It’s a nice and simple workflow. I don’t know what to tell you, it’s not rocket surgery. I mean, you’re the one trying to do image work on a tiny ass screen. I’m giving you a neat trick that worked perfectly for me. Sorry it is not good enough for you, I guess.
