@jwcph @baldur

To be a little uncharitable, the original GIMP user interface felt like an afterthought, as was common for OSS projects in that era. It was clunky and a little ugly and a bit greedy for screen real estate. I don't think anyone would call it 'elegant'.

The new user interface feels like the result of conscious, deliberate design -- but conscious, deliberate design that fails to be _for_ anyone.

Also, the original trick of menu being invisible and available only on right-click was weird, but maybe consistent with UX of original X11 apps. At least, toolbox was available all the time.

In the current version, menu can be found, where you would expect it 20 years ago (funny thing: in browser UX, menu is now not where you would expect it 20 years ago and works little like GIMP worked back then), but you have to open toolbox as new Window.

This is what I mean that "original GIMP UI was not that bad". I can use GIMP probably only because I started 20 years ago, and I now the features are there, only the new way to find these features is perhaps even more confusing, than the old way.

Speaking about "target group": well, programmers and coders in 1990s had to understand stuff like color channels, indexed colors, and so, even layers. Perhaps, GIMP would be powerful tool for making animated GIFs on Amiga ecosystem (before being adopted by web, GIF format was used by Amiga hobbyists and by BBS scene...)

GIMP is at least very powerful conversion, resizing and cropping tool for many classical image exchange formats. It is not so practical for creative work, perhaps because it was designed by people, who needed other specific tasks to be done.

There are some features, which nobody really wants or uses, but which were relatively easy to implement and other tools of the era had them too.

Speaking about UI... I still prefer Gtk over other toolkits. I use MATE desktop (GNOME 2 fork).

@jwcph @baldur

Major bonus: it's not lead and followed by tiresome people who think rape jokes and slurs against disabled people are funny.

The problem with GIMP's user interface is that it doesn't appear to be focused on any other group of users' needs either, though.

GIMP's UI just sort of exists. It doesn't appear to have been designed with any particular target group of users in mind.

But Krita's documentation is fantastic, and I'd definitely be using it if my work was more focused on the art itself, I'd definitely be spending quality time with it.

Graphite - Your procedural toolbox for 2D content creation

https://graphite.art/

Still alpha, but definitely something to look out for.

Krita is wonderful to use. I haven't used it too much, but it's now my go-to recommemdation for folks who want to try out digital art.

I remember trying GIMP back in college and it really sucked for me in particular, so I settled on something called FireAlpaca, which worked way better for me. Krita is better than FireAlpaca. I'd definitely recommend trying it.

but that's basically only an option for people who already know photoshop by rote and can go by without looking for knobs and buttons in the ui.