this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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Downplaying the importance of UX is one of the reasons the year of the Linux desktop still has not arrived.
Its close but when gnome is still saying "lmao bro you're supposed to know how to use terminal to make empty files bro" and "nonono you are too stupid for mmb paste toggle" in the same breath, it will be a while.
The average user doesnβt need empty files
Also
Whatβs the issue with this
Out of touch.
Mmb to paste is a simple, easy to understand option that is a simple preference that some people might like. But it's locked away for no reason. It served as an example on how out of touch gnome philosophy is.
Did you just seriously say the average user doesn't need to make empty files?
When do they?
At the lowest they are making text files
If by importance of UX you mean "your program should look and behave exactly like this other program made by a corpo, because I've learned that one already".
In reality The Year Of The Linux might never arrive, it doesn't have a multibillion corporation spending multi billions in order to make Linux a default software on every computer you buy. (to pedants: Android doesn't count)
Not necessarily, but humans are creatures of habit. If your app doesn't follow existing patterns, you better have a good reason for it.
It is true however that UX research is pretty poor on Linux, outside of say Gnome, but I think Linux apps could also take notes from market leaders and see what works from them and why.
It's not always just a spreadsheet comparison of features, it's considering the UX for different screens and user journeys and comparing them to one another.
You kidding me? Gnome has the worst UX of them all. The UI is kind of OK, but the UX is fucked beyound repair.
I disagree, they've got a consistent UX framework across the board, inputs are clear, navigation is the same across gdk apps. Is it consistent with other DEs? Not quite. But all gnome apps are easy to use, have pleasing UIs and generally share patterns that make it easy to see them as part of the same family even if an app is third party.
No. Importance of UX simply means advance users can customize their workflow while making it easy to use for casual users.
Kinda like Krita or Blender. Both are not perfect, but the dev are working on it, together with the community.
Even GIMP dev also working on that, they have GIMP UX issue tracker here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/
Oftentimes established workflow is already simple. There's no need to reinvent this from scratch. Example: Npainter and AzPainter are heavily inspired by PaintToolSAI. Inochi Creator is a clone (with unique feature) of Live2D Cubism.
Ehhh flexibility is a good feature to have, but it's not a requirement for good UX. Good UX should work for both beginner and advanced users, whether you do that through a single UI, different presets, or customizable panels depends on the use case and features available. A good music player for example doesn't need a highly flexible UI to have good UX.
If anything, a good UX should know what tools people use most and how the rest of the market does theirs to have something that's transferrable but also that works well with your feature set and brand vision
I'm talking flexible UI as relative to Clip Studio Paint.
The software is now an industry standard for manga, webtoon, 2D animation, and general ACG-related illustration in Asia. It was so good that there's no other alternative that have it. Not even Photoshop or Krita.
I read that Krita dev also agree that it will be nice to have it.
There's a ton of unique workflow only be possible with it.
That is NOT at all what people are saying. They're saying that glueing together 15 different UX paradigms into a program is not as intuitive as something designed before it was coded by people with expertise in exactly that. Design is real no matter how much you don't want it to be. This attitude is directly hurting open source software.
I think the difference is with their software you can play around the UI and figure out things by intuition and trial and error
The same thing is not enough in FOSS in many cases. Like for ex, drawing solid shapes in GIMP
For three years I worked teaching computers to adults, and for four years I was a system administrator/helpdesk for a big office.
I can absolutely assure you, from my experience, there is nothing inheritly easier or harder to figure out in close source software vs foss, in windows vs linux, in gui vs console, in Photoshop vs Gimp.
The only difference is, what did a person encountered before. The idea that you can give a person photoshop and they will draw you a sold shape, but you give the same person gimp and they will not be able to never stood up to my experience with probably thousands of people.
I for one have never used Photoshop but I used to use Gimp occasionally for some semi-technical markup and annotation. I remember being baffled by how to make a hollow circle, as opposed to a solid one. I kept forgetting the process so I had to look it up every time. Nowadays I just use canva since I don't want to analyse menus and tool options every time. I don't have to use Photoshop to say that Gimp's UI can be better. Anyway, I also use Audacity extensively and although it's not as outstanding of a case as Gimp, the older versions were a pain, nowadays it's much better but still plenty to improve (I have not used other audio editing softwares)
Then again I learn software by intuition and exploring menus (rarely I go to read the manual, as do majority of the people I imagine), if I was taught how to use it by someone like you, maybe things would be different, but I doubt that's how most people interact with software.
Every editing software that I ever touched, no matter what it edits, images, video, audio, had me baffled about some of decisions, small and big. For my own sanity I just accepted it as a part of life, like a bad weather.
There are definitely a lot of little things in gimp that make it hard. The lack of a shapetool is one(yes yes it's not a drawing app but a basic edition helps) and other things like adding text with a black outline or shadow. After literally decades they finally added in a way to make it easier to image macro text in. The old way involved several submenus and I know I couldnt figure it out on my own without a guide.
I know sometimes people come into an opensource ecosystem and complain that everything is worse because they arent used to it, but at the same time there are a lot of open source programs that are very rough around the edges and the developer cant see it because they know the program inside and out so of course it's intuitive that this feature is burried in here and this feature way in there.
no, we want the tried and tested workflow that works well for pros to use.
take it as someone who used photoshop professionally in the past.
That's what I mean. You used photoshop professionally, you are used to its interface, you want everything to have the same interface so you don't have to learn a new one. It's normal, we all are like that. The problems start when you try to hide it behind words like "intuitive", "industry standart", and "good for everyone"
say what you will about adobe and you might be right, but photoshop was perfected over years for an efficient pro workflow, and the industry coalesced around how similar software works.
to the point GIMP is not an effective tool. I would excuse them for trying to make it actually "intuitive", but as it stands, its neither "industry standard", nor "good for everyone".
this is my point. wanna come up with something better? please do, but its not close.
But that's like you know, your opinion, man.
What Photoshop is, is a more feature-full app, that's fore sure, but all the claims of it being better at workflow only come from people who learned it already. It might be true, but it also could be Stockholm syndrome, there is no way to evaluate that, really. 20 years ago I was shit at coding, now I can do in an hour what I was able to do in a month back then. That's because C++ perfected its workflow, and for no other reasons.
I am not a graphical guy, I only use Gimp for a number of limited uses, but I used it a lot for that, and I'm very efficient in what I do with it. If I open Photoshop, it will take me 20 times more time to do the same. But I know for a fact it's not because of some inherent beterness of one over the other.
i used to literally use it for work. its not just my own opinion, and its slightly supported.
of course the landscape could have changed in the meantime, but that was the consensus among professionals at the time. you couldn't send your delivery with anything other than a .psd, and gimp must have that success if we are to use it in lieau of other foss tools like krita at least.
i want things to be better in that respect and i know gimp has the potential to disrupt the crappy status quo if it had a better ui.
I guessed that, and that was the point of my comment. It's impossible to tell, do you and your fellow professionals like it better, or did you just got used to it so much and don't want to learn a new one. It's not impossible to imagine - because it happens frequently - that there is an app with measurably better UI, that people don't want to adopt. I'm not saying Gimp is that, personally I think all of them are terrible, all in their own unique way, and I don't know if it's possible to make a good one for this application.
When I worked as a sysadmin, I saw this happening all the fucking time. Hundreds of people prefer doing something in 50 clicks instead of using a new app that allows doing the same in 10, because previous way is ingrained in their muscle memory, and they absolutely, positively convinced that the old way is strictly unmistakably better, and they would fight me with deadly force so they could retain their old ways.
After that, I really don't believe in people's objectivity when it comes to that. I don't think people can tell what is "better UI".
When are language models gonna be able to help there - a couple are doing such a good job regurgitating aesthetically acceptable draft web designs (stolen though they may be). They even figure out some logic along the way.
Anybody know of any existing LLM-driven UX enhancement plans on any open-source projects?
thats more a lack of people to do the things we need to be done problem, than some secret formula of how to make good UX.
LLMs won't help here, we need an attitude shift away from excusing GIMP just because its FOSS, and the money/manpower to execute it.
if the good folks at Blender did it, we can do it too if we really wanted to.
I need to find an open source project with poor UX and high personal utility (e.g. in a space Iβm comfortable in). I could help!
I will say something I enjoy quite a bit is dictating long rambling monologues to a nearly flawless machine transcription system. Then I make multiple language models try to mock up and wireframe my ideas. They might be mostly or totally non-functional, but still communicate my vision very clearly & effectively.
go after such a project. a lot of the bigger ones can very much use designers, and are sometimes actively looking for contributors. this type of manpower is rare to see in the foss world.
onboarding is sadly not that good most of the time.
Yep. I use Gimp, digiKam and Darktable for literally decades now. I am utterly lost on Adobe software.