Downplaying the importance of UX is one of the reasons the year of the Linux desktop still has not arrived.
If by importance of UX you mean “your program should look and behave exactly like this other program made by a corpo, because I’ve learned that one already”.
In reality The Year Of The Linux might never arrive, it doesn’t have a multibillion corporation spending multi billions in order to make Linux a default software on every computer you buy. (to pedants: Android doesn’t count)Valve sells all of its computers with Linux on it, no?
They don’t sell all-purpose computers, they sell gaming systems that run Linux underneath. The regular user never has to interact with the OS
They also don’t sell that many of them.
Some quick googling says that Valve has sold nearly 4 million decks, which is pretty good.
Lenovo sold ~62 million computers last year alone. And they only make up ~1/4 of global market share
I guess all valve has to do is release steam machines again and then what? Suddenly the year of the Linux desktop isn’t here?
We’re talking about regular users having Linux as their operation system, not what happens under the hood of specialised machines. Steam machine user doesn’t run Linux, they run Steam.
Ah you’re right, it just cannot happen with a steam machine.
The year of of the Linux happened long ago. However we fail to recognize it, because wasn’t exactly what we were expecting. Most super computer is TOP500 as well as servers and majority of portable devices in the world are powered by the Linux kernel.
If the definition of Year of Linux was based on having astonishing UX then, this is probably something that will never happen.
We’re talking about home computers, regular users running their personal OS.
Not necessarily, but humans are creatures of habit. If your app doesn’t follow existing patterns, you better have a good reason for it.
It is true however that UX research is pretty poor on Linux, outside of say Gnome, but I think Linux apps could also take notes from market leaders and see what works from them and why.
It’s not always just a spreadsheet comparison of features, it’s considering the UX for different screens and user journeys and comparing them to one another.
You kidding me? Gnome has the worst UX of them all. The UI is kind of OK, but the UX is fucked beyound repair.
I disagree, they’ve got a consistent UX framework across the board, inputs are clear, navigation is the same across gdk apps. Is it consistent with other DEs? Not quite. But all gnome apps are easy to use, have pleasing UIs and generally share patterns that make it easy to see them as part of the same family even if an app is third party.
I agree on consistency. It does have vision and it is consistently implemented.
It has different problems. It doesn’t play well with apps written not for it, it doesn’t allow for a good deal of customisation, and full of bugs and questionable decisions. All the UI stuff is subjective, but bugs and unresponsiveness isn’t.Eh can’t really blame it for not being more open I think to customisation, it is an issue but not really a UX one I think. Any UI could be faulted for that then, not being customisable enough. As for apps not written for it again, not something they have control over. Could say the same about any DE, or even Mac or windows when they use non standard blocks
but not really a UX
What else could it be if not UX. Not being able to setup a shortcut for the keyboard layout change without a bunch of bullshit hoops is an eXperience I have as a User.
Any UI could be faulted for that then
Yes, it’s a metric by which we measure the experience. Sometimes things should and could be easily customisable, and if they aren’t, it’s a fault of the UI.
As for apps not written for it again, not something they have control over
If they’re making a window manager, they need to consider apps that user might run with this window manager. If for example a browser doesn’t render half of the internet correctly because they added an unexpected rendering conventions, it’s a shit browser. Same could be said about desktop environment.
Other DE expected to run apps, Gnome expects that you write your app with Gnome in mind, that’s a big difference.
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That’s what I mean. You used photoshop professionally, you are used to its interface, you want everything to have the same interface so you don’t have to learn a new one. It’s normal, we all are like that. The problems start when you try to hide it behind words like “intuitive”, “industry standart”, and “good for everyone”
Yep. I use Gimp, digiKam and Darktable for literally decades now. I am utterly lost on Adobe software.
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But that’s like you know, your opinion, man.
What Photoshop is, is a more feature-full app, that’s fore sure, but all the claims of it being better at workflow only come from people who learned it already. It might be true, but it also could be Stockholm syndrome, there is no way to evaluate that, really. 20 years ago I was shit at coding, now I can do in an hour what I was able to do in a month back then. That’s because C++ perfected its workflow, and for no other reasons.
I am not a graphical guy, I only use Gimp for a number of limited uses, but I used it a lot for that, and I’m very efficient in what I do with it. If I open Photoshop, it will take me 20 times more time to do the same. But I know for a fact it’s not because of some inherent beterness of one over the other.deleted by creator
i used to literally use it for work
I guessed that, and that was the point of my comment. It’s impossible to tell, do you and your fellow professionals like it better, or did you just got used to it so much and don’t want to learn a new one. It’s not impossible to imagine - because it happens frequently - that there is an app with measurably better UI, that people don’t want to adopt. I’m not saying Gimp is that, personally I think all of them are terrible, all in their own unique way, and I don’t know if it’s possible to make a good one for this application.
When I worked as a sysadmin, I saw this happening all the fucking time. Hundreds of people prefer doing something in 50 clicks instead of using a new app that allows doing the same in 10, because previous way is ingrained in their muscle memory, and they absolutely, positively convinced that the old way is strictly unmistakably better, and they would fight me with deadly force so they could retain their old ways.
After that, I really don’t believe in people’s objectivity when it comes to that. I don’t think people can tell what is “better UI”.
I’m sure having all computers in existence come by default with window and offering free stuff to students has nothing to do with it.
/s
Naaah, it’s just companies like Adobe, Autodesk and Microsoft shitting on Linux users each time they can.
dude if your ui is unusable you’re gonna hear about it.
you can’t make an open source car that has two joysticks instead of a steering wheel and talk about industry standards and vendor lock ins when people say it sucks.
I mean it’s cool that it exists for non drivers who sometimes want to jump on an open source car for a quick trip but if driving is your job then the joysticks being technically functional won’t cut it.
that doesn’t mean you have to copy everything 1:1, if people are looking for alternatives one reason might be that not everything about the standard car is great. affinity has some great differences in tools but they’re designed in a way that makes sense to pro users.
I’ve said this before but there’s a severe lack of designers in the open source space. there should be a platform that enables designers to relatively easily contribute to open source projects without learning git or whatever the fuck.
a platform that enables designers to relatively easily contribute to open source projects without learning git
Reading this made me a bit sad.
On the one hand, I understand how tools like this could be a hurdle for someone who isn’t heavily invested in their use. And on the other, as someone who has tinkered with open source projects, I know that as hurdles go, git is the first of very many hurdles that must be cleared when contributing to a large, mature GUI program like this, and it’s a pretty low one at that.It would be great if more people could contribute to and help develop open-source versions of tools they themselves use, but I can certainly see how tough it can be starting out
Not low at all. After you contribute the maintainer be like “can you rebase it all to one commit”
And then you end up force pushing and ping 4000 people
Or you accidentally close your pull request
If no conflict, GitHub has a button to squash all commits in a pull request.
Open source software design sucks because they don’t have desginers (who know git) because they can’t attract designers (who know git) because they don’t have money (free and open source) because they don’t have big userbase (which can lead to more people donating) because oss software design sucks.
The problem is even if a designer contributes (say they open an issue with design feedback or even wireframes and such) developers seldom see as much value in a redesign as there is in working on features they care about, because open source is driven by developers making apps that they would use firstly.
that’s fine but there should be less defensiveness about people criticizing the design then
Yall just use Krita if you want a photoshop replacement on Linux and then stop complaining about gimp please. Krita draws circles exactly like photoshop please just use Krita and leave the gimp people alone
We have ISO standards. Fuck every single company that ignores those (Microsoft, Apple, …).
Under the hood I actually really like GIMP. I’m also not too bothered by there being no circle tool. My problem with GIMP is that if there were a circle tool in it, its a little too difficult to find it if it does exist.
If they had some front end re-write eventually where they just moved some stuff around and better organized the front end of the application, I think a lot more people would use it. UX/UI is really important, and I’m sure the contributors of GIMP know this as they seem to have done well to try to make the interface feel straightforward by putting stuff under menu’s and whatnot, but the location of things just seems unintuitive/non-standard compared to what every other application does.
The other issue I have with GIMP is just that its development cycle takes forever compared to most every other open source application I have seen.
Not to say there is a great answer to any of this, image manipulation/animation software is not an easy thing to program by any means so I understand why it can take forever, but I just wish there was a real answer.
In the mean time, I’ve just been trying to get by with krita, though krita really seems geared toward digital painting specifically.
A great remedy to stuff being hard to find is that you can press the slash key
/to open a command paletteThat is interesting and I did not know that. Thanks.
That is a bandaid though, it’s an abstract way of interacting with an application and you can’t really build muscle memory around it
Before they abandoned it for Gnome 3, Ubuntu’s Unity DE had the ability to search any program’s menus. Was really handy for many things, but especially Gimp.
It’s not a standard until there’s an ISO, RFC, IEEE or IEC number to go with it.
BUT I CAN
Cool design.
Eli5?
It’s an thing people used to say when they wanted to justify not using the software gimp
You mean a common user experience that leaves many new users frustrated.
Agree, Adobe products always leave me frustrated, and my experience is universal.
Yup and honestly the hostility those users get when mentioning it is the same reason Linux doesn’t get more traction in the mainstream.
When a lot of users expect software to work in a particular way and it doesn’t, you change the software - if you insult, belittle or otherwise expect the user to change their working habits then you’re going to have a bad time and be all shocked Pikachu when the user doesn’t use the software.
Apple is (was lol) the most valuable company on the planet because they understood that the user experience is the absolute most important thing. They are the textbook example of vendor lock in and yet people flock to them because “it just works”.
the hostility
“Hey, why this free software I tried once IS SO SHIT AND UNINTUITIVE AND EVERYONE WHO MADE IT IS PLAIN STUPID AND WRONG, NOW HELP ME IMMEDIATELY YOU FUCKING NERDS. Man, nobody fixed my problem immediately, what a hostile envoroment”.
you change the software
Oh, so that’s what big corpos were doing this whole time? Damn, what a cool environment that should be, you buy software and it behaves like you want it to be, and if it doesn’t, you complain to the corpo and it fixes it for you immediately.
Apple is (was lol) the most valuable company on the planet because they understood
that you don’t need to sell software or hardware, you need to sell brand recognition, feel of premium exclusivity, and smug satisfaction of being better than the plebs. And as long as your shit doesn’t crap out tremendous amount, you can ruse the rubes.
I think your response is unintentionally proving my point lol
Maybe, but people who demand volunteers to provide more labor than they are willing to also are the problem. You don’t seem to grasp the nature of volunteering. It isn’t meant to serve you—volunteers do what they want when they want to because you won’t do what they want. They have your same frustrations: I want it to do X! So they do it.
I’ll also say this: arguments like yours have been used for decades while Linux is getting more and more popular. Maybe, just maybe, you’re wrong.
Linux is getting more popular because corporations like valve have put the effort into refining the user experience. I’m not just talking about a pretty UI either, I’m taking things like proton that makes playing games on Linux as easy as playing on windows.
I’m not saying there aren’t people out there that demand free labour from volunteers - of course there are; I maintain and have contributed to a few open source projects myself so I know all too well what that’s like.
However, I would say those folks are a very small (albeit vocal and annoying) minority. The vast, vast majority of users simply dismiss Linux/GIMP/Whatever because it’s not suitable for them. They don’t go screaming into GitHub demanding features, they don’t post on Lemmy that the software sucks or otherwise create a fuss, they just gravitate towards the stuff that works for them (usually something proprietary) with the least friction.
And I think you missed the point of my response
Yeah you’re right, it’s the users that are at fault.
I haven’t used photoshop or any other “industry standard” in more than a decade.
Still, everytime I open Gimp I have to look up for the “increase/decrease brush size” shortcut, because it’s so dawn counter intuitive.
The UI was overhauled in the 3.0 update on March. The new documentation says changing brush size is fairly easy: https://testing.docs.gimp.org/3.0/tr/gimp-using-variable-size-brush.html
All brushes have a variable size that can be changed.
You can change the brush size in several ways:
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By using the default shortcut keys for changing a tool’s size:
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Decrease size by 1: [
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Increase size by 1: ]
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Decrease size by 10: {
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Increase size by 10: }
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By using the default mouse scrollwheel actions for changing a tool’s size:
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Decrease size by 1: Ctrl+Alt+Scrollwheel Down
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Increase size by 1: Ctrl+Alt+Scrollwheel Up
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You can make circles in Krita
It’s possible in Ligma, too.
photoshop has got problems, but gimp and krita have the sort of problems that i never had using PS. like, completely missing functions and tools that are standard in PS. maybe there’s an extension, maybe there isn’t, and troubleshooting is time and energy spent when i have little to spare on making art or whatever
Tried Serif Affinity? Photoshop is great mate but it’s not worth that cash.
Wait, you can’t make circles in GIMP? This has to be false. If my memory serves me well, I remember using GIMP for a school project back in the day and I’m pretty sure it could make circle.
You can, it’s just not as simple as click on circle shape maker. You have to make a circle with the circle selection tool than turn it into a path. It’s only difficult when you’re first figuring it out. Once you do, it’s not a big deal.
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Cue the 20-minute alley fight!
Have you tried squares, mate?
