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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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Ironically, this attitude is a major blocker for the GIMP team when it comes to bigger UI/UX changes -- there's a vocal contingent who will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.
Firefox's incredibly light-touch visual changes recently are a great example of this; it's not "this is demonstrably worse," it's "change makes me uncomfortable."
I do totally appreciate that changes can be genuinely problematic for a subset of users, especially the elderly, but the vitriol that gets spewed when a project overhauls a UI embarrasses me as a user.
Side note: the GIMP UI is generally pretty good these days. There's room for improvement, and it has a learning curve (as do all complex applications, to some degree) but it's shed a lot of its least intuitive aspects.
On mobile the changes are more obnoxious. Tabs now take up a lot of screen real estate, despite chromium being an example of being functional and efficient at that for years.
Also, changing the look just to change the look is dumb. UI/UX changes should have a benefit to them. And what people frustratingly seem unable to understand is that newer doesn't always mean better.
You mean the two buttons, to show the tabs and to add a new tab?
Some people get used to how their daily tools work and look, so when the UI suddenly changes, our efficiency and comfort decreases until we tweak it to our liking and/or get used to it. The closest analogue I can think of, imagine that every few years you wake up to the furniture having been rearranged in your house.
I didn't see the point of the Firefox redesign either, and had to spend some time in userchrome.css to make it not actively repulsive :/ A few weeks later now I reached the state of "eh ok", but I still don't think it's an improvement.
If you just want the pre-Nova UI it's probably easier to about:config > browser.nova.enabled = false
Sadly those flags are only temporary measures, and tend to get removed after a few months.
maybe every few years you get a new car? it does all the same things, maybe even better things with new bells and whistles, but fuck all y'all who decided to get rid of my buttons [oldmanyellsatclouds.jif]
okay but some of google's icon changes have been really bad
I wonder if it's possible to build seperate UI that sits on top of the underlying backend and can be switched easily. So that ppl from PS can start quick.
I think a lot of people underestimate the maintenance burden of options like this. It's another trope you see often with UI changes -- "just let me switch it back."
The problem is that now, even if your UI is super nicely decoupled from your engine, everything you change under the hood is likely to need at least regression testing in two places rather than one -- that workload has doubled.
As it happens, though, with your specific example, there's someone actively maintaining a GIMP ~~fork~~ mod called PhotoGIMP to achieve this, but I notice despite recent(ish) commits, they're still a minor version and a year behind.
The whole conversation reminds me of this XKCD
you just explained fairly well to me why windows decided to lock the taskbar on the bottom for a while. or at least a reason they might.
Like with Linux distros and which DE you run?
there have been several, including one that tried to look like photoshop but then ended up being malware.
You get the same with Apple fans when Apple introduces something new. They all get really angry about it.