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Think we’re revising history here, Blender was completely shunned until they started doing the exact opposite of GIMP and building for their users instead of bu

Think we’re revising history here, Blender was completely shunned until they started doing the exact opposite of GIMP and building for their users instead of building for the sake of building. It certainly had no first mover advantage and even poor students spent thousands just to not have to learn it and no professional studios used it. This all changed within a few years of them fixing the UI and focusing on users. >GEGL filters in the menu is what stops you from using Gimp? It’s one example but my point is already proven by you calling them “GEGL Filters” step back from your biases for a second and really think about what you wrote and the wider implications to the rest of the application and its users. People just feel they instinctively have to defend GIMP because it was one of the early larger real desktop Linux open source successes but to me it represents one thing, completely wasted opportunity and the importance of how culture and ideology of a team can squander something that could have been amazing. “Oh people would never have switched from Photoshop, the workflow and keys are different” is pure cope, we know this because Figma decimated Photoshop and Illustrator as web/app design tools in about 2 years just by offering a better tool. GIMP could have done this 20+ years ago with the right ideology.

necovek 2y ago
No it could not have done it. Gimp was ever only an enthusiast developer-driven, and 1-2 engineers that it actively had working on it could not have pulled it off. It has nothing to do with the ideology, just sheer complexity of the effort: GNOME HIG in the 2.0 times was very much focused on good, consistent UI that caters to the users (mostly driven by Sun Microsystems contributions). But bringing individual examples of bad UI (I can do so for MacOS, the poster child of usability too) does not mean it's like that on purpose — it's mostly just that, bad instances. A program is usable based on the whole experience with it, and the results one can achieve. Gimp is not perfect (far from it, really), but for a set of usecases, it is perfectly adequate. The success or lack of it is not only driven by usability: there are perfectly good tools that simply bit the dust for who knows what reason.
necovek 2y ago
And looking at https://www.blender.org/about/history/ https://www.blender.org/about/history/, I think Blender mostly owns its success to exactly the marketing approach and not any of the technical properties (its parent companies actually died twice before it was made free software and a base for community competitions). Which is exactly how I remember it as an outsider (I wasn't interested in 3D at the time).

necovek 2y ago

No it could not have done it. Gimp was ever only an enthusiast developer-driven, and 1-2 engineers that it actively had working on it could not have pulled it off. It has nothing to do with the ideology, just sheer complexity of the effort: GNOME HIG in the 2.0 times was very much focused on good, consistent UI that caters to the users (mostly driven by Sun Microsystems contributions). But bringing individual examples of bad UI (I can do so for MacOS, the poster child of usability too) does not mean it's like that on purpose — it's mostly just that, bad instances. A program is usable based on the whole experience with it, and the results one can achieve. Gimp is not perfect (far from it, really), but for a set of usecases, it is perfectly adequate. The success or lack of it is not only driven by usability: there are perfectly good tools that simply bit the dust for who knows what reason.

necovek 2y ago

And looking at https://www.blender.org/about/history/ https://www.blender.org/about/history/, I think Blender mostly owns its success to exactly the marketing approach and not any of the technical properties (its parent companies actually died twice before it was made free software and a base for community competitions). Which is exactly how I remember it as an outsider (I wasn't interested in 3D at the time).