linuxmemes

dude if your ui is unusable you're gonna hear about it.

you can't make an open source car that has two joysticks instead of a steering wheel and talk about industry standards and vendor lock ins when people say it sucks.

I mean it's cool that it exists for non drivers who sometimes want to jump on an open source car for a quick trip but if driving is your job then the joysticks being technically functional won't cut it.

that doesn't mean you have to copy everything 1:1, if people are looking for alternatives one reason might be that not everything about the standard car is great. affinity has some great differences in tools but they're designed in a way that makes sense to pro users.

I've said this before but there's a severe lack of designers in the open source space. there should be a platform that enables designers to relatively easily contribute to open source projects without learning git or whatever the fuck.

Downplaying the importance of UX is one of the reasons the year of the Linux desktop still has not arrived.

I haven't used photoshop or any other "industry standard" in more than a decade.

Still, everytime I open Gimp I have to look up for the "increase/decrease brush size" shortcut, because it's so dawn counter intuitive.

Yall just use Krita if you want a photoshop replacement on Linux and then stop complaining about gimp please. Krita draws circles exactly like photoshop please just use Krita and leave the gimp people alone

Krita, motherfuckers. Do you use it?

Under the hood I actually really like GIMP. I'm also not too bothered by there being no circle tool. My problem with GIMP is that if there were a circle tool in it, its a little too difficult to find it if it does exist.

If they had some front end re-write eventually where they just moved some stuff around and better organized the front end of the application, I think a lot more people would use it. UX/UI is really important, and I'm sure the contributors of GIMP know this as they seem to have done well to try to make the interface feel straightforward by putting stuff under menu's and whatnot, but the location of things just seems unintuitive/non-standard compared to what every other application does.

The other issue I have with GIMP is just that its development cycle takes forever compared to most every other open source application I have seen.

Not to say there is a great answer to any of this, image manipulation/animation software is not an easy thing to program by any means so I understand why it can take forever, but I just wish there was a real answer.

In the mean time, I've just been trying to get by with krita, though krita really seems geared toward digital painting specifically.

We have ISO standards. Fuck every single company that ignores those (Microsoft, Apple, ...).

Vendor lock in is the reason I went to a fully open source workflow like fifteen years ago. When you rely on these companies for tools, they own your work. They can jack up prices, change TOS whenever they want, paywall features, train AIs on your work, and jerk you around on a chain at their whim. I don't mind a little jank or having to do some workarounds for a certain result to keep my freedom. And also, when a new release comes out that fixes an issue ive been having, I feel grateful! In the closed ecosystem you feel entitled and resentful and powerless. It's not worth it.

You can make circles in Krita

I was contemplating switching from Cinema 4D to Blender for a long time, but the UX of C4d was so nice and Blender’s frankly sucked. Then 2.8 came out with a UI overhaul that changed all that and now I’d never dream of switching to another 3d package when Blender is so easy to use, extensible with Python, and has a huge community around it. Blender’s popularity soared after the UX changes. Sometimes, a UI overhaul can make all the difference.

Even where Blender falls short, there’s usually an addon that fills the gap, often paid, but still open source, which is 1000x better than competing options that almost always involve a subscription.

The benefit of a community of open source software around it also can’t be overstated. For instance, MakeHuman kicks ass, Auto-Rig Pro makes it usable for mocap and character animation, etc. Blender Studio’s projects like Flamenco render farm and automated Blender Studio pipeline built around the also open source Kitsu that I self-host are also amazing. Collectively, it all blows Autodesk out of the water and should be a shining example to all other open source projects.

BUT I CAN

Hey, I was a GIMP convert even during the long dark ages of GIMP where you couldn't do any kind of bulk layer selection or moving or lots of maddening things... and you know what I kept fucking using it because it was always there for me, ready to help me make a shitty meme.

GIMP has recently gotten MUCH better though, it is a straight up beast now.

It's not a standard until there's an ISO, RFC, IEEE or IEC number to go with it.