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GIMP Dev when AI cloned Photoshop went viral
(lemmy.nz)
worked on it since 1998
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
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Fuck AI
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Gimp ux was bad. It's been fine for years.
Freecad is WAY newer, and has had a fraction of the developer time spent on it.
"Fine" meaning "it's technically possible to use it."
Adding and editing text is a nightmare. I feel like the only way you could say with a straight face is if you haven't used Photoshop since 2006. Hell, PowerPoint has a better interface in a lot of ways.
I hate dunking on them like that but let's not lie to ourselves here. GIMP is good enough but the UI was clearly made by engineers, not artists
"The ux is fine" doesn't mean it's feature perfect. I agree the text editor sucks, I use other tools like inkscape when I need text.
My point is that you CAN do those things but it's several extra steps. I have to look up how to do things that are straight forward in other software
I'm an engineer and I have no idea what they were going for with that UI
That's fair. I'm an engineer, too, and the UI brings me pain. Especially because my previous career had creative cloud as the daily software.
I guess I meant more the engineer mindset of "I already know how to use it so it's good enough"
It reminds me of AutoCAD, my current daily software, which feels like a thousand bandaids stacked on top of each other over the course of 25 years.
I feel obligated to say that having a bad UI doesn't mean it's bad software. I'm just tired of people pretending it's polished lol
In GIMP? You select the text tool, you click it on the canvas. It's that simple.
Ok now add a drop shadow. Curve it or add perspective.
Compare that experience to Photoshop
And CAD is ridiculously complex. Students also practice like half a year to cope with the proprietary market leaders. I sometimes think people complain because they confuse tools made for professionals with some game on easy mode.
But yeah, FreeCAD also isn't on par with professional tools. It's surprisingly capable and has a lot of features. And they made it crash way less. 2 years ago it used to crash several times each project when adding some chamfers or some other easy stuff and I had to do lots of stuff in order or it wouldn't work. As of now I'd say it's perfectly usable for the average hobby project. Just don't expect any CAD software to be usable without any kind of background knowledge. There's other tools for that kind of 3D design.
FreeCAD still fucks up with chamfers with annoying regularity unless you're really careful. That being said, it doesn't crash from it anymore.
That being said, their workflow is way better now. It used to be that you were expected to remember exact locations of vertices, so it was about 20 years of regression from where most other CAD packages were at the time. Now it's purely graphical and you can actually connect features properly
I've spent 3 years learning freecad, and it's bad, it's entirely incapable of holding up against moderately complex projects, a simple fillet can break the whole model. It got better with 1.0 but it's still so very far from competing with fusion or inventor / catia...
As for gimp... I've really tried adding it to my workflow, but it's been a massive headache, I'd likely use photocraft over it given both options...
When was the last time you tried? Free CAD evolves at breakneck speed.
1.1 still has a ways to go. I havent worked in 1.2+ all that much
dude i'm designing something right now and freecad is just what i need. Thanks!