this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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It's that phenomenon where people who endured trauma to attain something expect others to also endure the trauma.
I've tried learning GIMP, and it sucks. I'm not saying GIMP sucks, but you have to be crazy to not see that it's hard to learn.
No, GIMP does suck.
It has the same problem as most FOSS packages that are too wide in breadth and have multiple contributors with their own hobby horses pulling in all different directions, and to this day does not actually provide a feature-complete whole, nor an interface that actually makes sense. And it's not a matter of the workflow just being different -- it categorically fails to replicate functionality that is core to its commercial competitors. Numerous other "big" productivity packages have the same problem including FreeCAD (boy does it ever), LibreOffice, etc. I say this as a staunch supporter of FreeCAD, by the way. It's the only CAD software I use even though it's a pain in my ass.
The shining exception to this I see is Inkscape, but it is still significantly less powerful than even early versions of CorelDraw.
For 2D graphics work these days, I hold my nose and just use Corel. I use it for work. Like, actual commercial work. That I get paid for. It is at least a lesser evil than doing business with Adobe.
And if you want to stick it to the man, it is easily pirated.
In FOSS most people can program, but only a hand full of people can design a decent UI.
I always wondered if I could contribute/volunteer to a FOSS somehow with some UIX stuff, but I don't even know where to start. Would you just draw a concept ui for the team to work out or something?
Not that I'm great at it, but man, we gotta start somewhere, right?
This is probably common. The people that work on UI often aren't the people who do pull requests. But I think if you want to contribute it would be best to get in touch with a maintainer on the chat of the project. Projects often have a matrix/irc/discord on the git page.
I think you can start a figma or other collaborative UI/UX as an idea first. If a developer is interested in implementing it, then you move on to the next feature
This never ceases to amaze me.
My old best friend and I used to be a programming tag team that worked pretty well; he'd slap together w semi-functional version of the idea we had and then id go in and make the UI make sense and fix all the logic bugs and typos.
I'm not saying I'm some perfect UI guru or anything but the way he (and other people I've met) seem to have no internal base knowledge of shit like "similar settings probably shouldn't go on completely opposite sides of the screen under different menus" or "5-deep nested drop-down menus hurt people's souls"
Honestly I still struggle a lot with this. I can click around a UI and feel what might confuse a user, but building a UI from scratch feels like such a shot in the dark.
There's also two main plus one lesser issue that are less commonly discussed:
Elitism is also a factor. A lot of people like the feeling of being part of a special group, and for them, the steep learning curve is a feature, not a bug. I've seen Blender users being angry at the devs for "spoonfeeding" the normies, and letting in all kinds of people. Also just look at OP's image.
So, why do UI people not use and contribute to FOSS then? Are they all on Mac? Then go complain to them or contribute your desired UI improvements. FOSS isn't an all you can eat buffet.
Personally, I think UI people are less idealistic and I do look down on them for that.
It's super hard to get involved as a UI person. If you're a developer, you can just rock up to a project and fix bugs, and if you follow the coding style they'll probably get accepted.
If you want to successfully contribute as a UI person you have to convince a bunch of developers that you know what they should be doing better than they do. It basically never happens.