GIMP is great but it definitely needs its own Blender 3.0 moment where they just completely overhaul the UI.

I’ve used it as my primary raster app so I’m way used to it now, but I totally understand the people who just never even bother to learn it because they are so turned off by the absolutely bonkers design decisions.

The damn thing was written by a couple of College Students who had no experience with graphic arts and man does it show. The UI has been the number #1 complaint since it was released back in 1998 so how it’s never been updated / overhauled is simply beyond me.

Why? Looks basically the same as photoshop, which everybody seems to love.

Among other things:

• monochrome color scheme prevents easy recognition of tools
• dozens and dozens of arcane options listed alongside super basic options
• weird sizing of buttons
• no help search, and no search that can associate synonyms where users don’t know what term to search for
• no inbuilt suggestions when user behaves strangely (eg. user is spamming the escape key, searching “deselect”, maybe suggest the deselect all hotkey?)

You can change the icon theme in the settings to a color one. That’s what I always do. The scaling can be changed as well.

May I ask what are some of the arcane options supposed to be?