> compared to the larger number of users asking for more CMYK support, shape tool, built-in Resynthesizer etc
This is because people with the complaint about text tend to open the software, see how bad moving text is, then close it and never open it again. They aren't the ones going onto your forums to complain. And when they do the bug stays open for 8 years (and counting) with the best response currently being to tell users that they're wrong for not knowing how to do it.
However GIMP gets feedback from users, it's producing bad outcomes. Out of "CMYK support, shape tool, built-in Resynthesizer", I think users want a shape tool. But they'll get CMYK support. Here's the shape tool issue and it's 23 years old.
Issue 12. Over 10,000 issues later and it hasn't been added. The existing solution to this is to select a shape and fill it. Why can they not add a tool which does both of these things in sequence? Again, perhaps a small change of code saves every new user of GIMP the annoyance of having to look up on google "how to draw circle in GIMP". Development should be prioritised in areas like this, where small changes to the code produce big wins in terms of UX. Instead, they focus on things like CMYK. I'm guessing that's a big change that won't affect most users. There's no point in developing these parts of the software if your UI has put off all the potential users. Look at Photopea, it has just one developer but eats GIMP's lunch on everything I just mentioned. GIMP needs to find a way of managing its devs to outdo a single person working on their own.
> I personally get inspiration for "big" projects to work on by scrolling various platforms and seeing what the most frequent complaints are, but that's not how development decisions are made.
A better approach would be to find someone who uses Photoshop, ask them to try GIMP, and record it. Then take the issues they ran into, and those are the most important things. If you want people to use any piece of software, you need to make them stick around long enough to actually do stuff in it, and that doesn't happen if the first thing they experience is bad. Basic things like they decided to put the button to search menus in a menu, so you might not be able to find it if you didn't already know it was there.
Actually, implementing vector layers and a shape tool is my next planned project after 3.0, so we'll hopefully get that first. :)
I've worked on 21+ year old issues, so I'm well aware of longstanding requests. For instance, I helped to implement built-in editable text outline options - another commonly searched for question about GIMP. The time we spent on that could have been spent on a number of other issues, and fixing each of those issues would have saved time for some users and annoyed others who'd prefer we'd work on something else.
Feedback from more users is always good, and I have watched Photoshop users work with GIMP. The immediate sticking points from those people were multi-selection, NDE, and a full CMYK mode - the text tool wasn't as big of a deal to those particular users as it is for you. That doesn't mean we don't want to make the UX better there, just that certain features are not equally important to everyone.
And it's great that you're doing that, but what if you get hit by a bus? Does the issue just go back into the "never gonna happen" bin? Why do you think it took 20 years to get started on implementing this, and what have you done to ensure that won't happen again?
Also, you should implement a raster shape tool before you try to implement a vector one. You'll get the feature out much faster that way.
I imagine another volunteer would come along, just like I did. That's the nature of an open source community project. Since I started, I've seen more developers join and work on their niche (building pipelines, text tool, plug-ins, etc).
I know that one of the behind-the-scenes things that Jehan (the maintainer) has been working on is establishing a foundation in partnership with GNOME. This will allow for easier methods of accepting donations, and developer grants to fund more sustained developer work. That obviously takes away from his coding time (and he's a much, much better programmer than I am!), but long term it will be very beneficial. Part of the GIMP 3.0 delay is due to those kinds of set-up work, where it's not immediately visible but will speed up future development.
For the shape tool, I think it'll be fairly quick once vector layers are implemented. At a high level, we'd just need to have some predefined vector layer shapes that users could manipulate. The functionality is there (one example: https://fosstodon.org/@CmykStudent/112063520232390856), the UI would be the sticking point.
A foundation definitely seems like a solution here. It worked well for Blender. I just wonder if such a central organisation is truly necessary. Perhaps block-chain is the solution. /s At any rate, I'm glad to see GIMP is starting to take it's role as the flagship of FOSS more seriously.
This comment strikes me as non-constructive. What do you actually want this person to do? Clone themselves? Yes, gimp needs more people working on it to get features out faster. Berating the people actually doing the work until they also quit is certainly not helping
Well there are other people working on GIMP. Perhaps someone should look into what they've been doing for the past 20 years. It seems fairly unlikely to me that they didn't have time to do this, so there must be some other cause to the problem which it might be possible to address. And if the problem has already been solved, it might be good to know how that happened to avoid regressing back to the old state. I think it's productive to try and diagnose the cause of issues like this.
"Perhaps someone should audit these volunteers working on a project for free"
It's always easy to handwave away any complexities in a project you know nothing about. It'd be one thing if you had concrete criticisms rather than just going in circles about how you're generally unhappy to an overly patient volunteer, but if your only suggestion is "someone should figure out what's going on", you might as well say nothing.
I think they would be happy to participate in some kind of audit. They surely want to organise their contributions in such a way as to produce the most benefit to the project. As for suggesting someone figure it out, I don't know why it happens and I would like to know. This is why I ask. I think knowing could benefit others and potentially also benefit me.
This is because people with the complaint about text tend to open the software, see how bad moving text is, then close it and never open it again.
more likely they just didn't feel as strongly about it as you do. difficult to move text is an inconvenience. and just to be clear, i have experienced the problem myself and got annoyed by it, but never annoyed enough that i would report an issue or look for alternative software. but lack of CMYK support or non-destructive editing are showstoppers that can't be worked around.
Then I think you are the outlier. Most people who use GIMP for the first do so from the position of already having a (potentially non-legally obtained) copy of Photoshop. They are trying the software out and stuff like this quickly turns them off the idea of using it. If I had to guess, you use Linux and so don't have the option of Photoshop. This seems to be the case for most GIMP users.
This is because people with the complaint about text tend to open the software, see how bad moving text is, then close it and never open it again. They aren't the ones going onto your forums to complain. And when they do the bug stays open for 8 years (and counting) with the best response currently being to tell users that they're wrong for not knowing how to do it.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=768667 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/933 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/8399
However GIMP gets feedback from users, it's producing bad outcomes. Out of "CMYK support, shape tool, built-in Resynthesizer", I think users want a shape tool. But they'll get CMYK support. Here's the shape tool issue and it's 23 years old.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/12
Issue 12. Over 10,000 issues later and it hasn't been added. The existing solution to this is to select a shape and fill it. Why can they not add a tool which does both of these things in sequence? Again, perhaps a small change of code saves every new user of GIMP the annoyance of having to look up on google "how to draw circle in GIMP". Development should be prioritised in areas like this, where small changes to the code produce big wins in terms of UX. Instead, they focus on things like CMYK. I'm guessing that's a big change that won't affect most users. There's no point in developing these parts of the software if your UI has put off all the potential users. Look at Photopea, it has just one developer but eats GIMP's lunch on everything I just mentioned. GIMP needs to find a way of managing its devs to outdo a single person working on their own.
> I personally get inspiration for "big" projects to work on by scrolling various platforms and seeing what the most frequent complaints are, but that's not how development decisions are made.
A better approach would be to find someone who uses Photoshop, ask them to try GIMP, and record it. Then take the issues they ran into, and those are the most important things. If you want people to use any piece of software, you need to make them stick around long enough to actually do stuff in it, and that doesn't happen if the first thing they experience is bad. Basic things like they decided to put the button to search menus in a menu, so you might not be able to find it if you didn't already know it was there.