Tired: Forking #GIMP because the name is bad.
Wired: Forking GIMP to keep it GTK2, or somehow (lol) switch it over to a sane UI toolkit, like Qt... or WxWindows... or Tk... or XForms... or QuickBasic... or a flipping Abacus.
Any takers? 🤣
Addendum:
Inspired: Saying 'Eff this' and just using KolourPaint... or a pen and a napkin 😂
I had no idea Gimp was originally based on Motif. That would be amazing to see!!
@rl_dane I think it was version 0.54 that was Motif, and sometimes after that they changed due to it still being proprietary at the time (I think you had to download a statically linked binary).
I never quite understood why they didn't base their new version on Xt, too, instead of also re-inventing that layer with glib/gobject. But well, these days they probably would invent another language to go along with it ;)
I mean, GTK1 was pretty dang nifty at the time. It wasn't a crime to reinvent the wheel when most of the preexisting wheels were kinda wobbly. ;)
I think we love stuff like Motif because it's like a metonym for a sane era of UI design. But there were probably nicer options at the time, or soon after.
@rl_dane All wheels are wobbly, to be honest. And heck, I'm as guilty as the next guy when it comes to reinventing GUI details. In the beginning, Qt was missing some common controls (I think it was things like tabs and comboboxes), and thus the "Linux Widget Project" was born, and then we all went "C++ isn't the optimal OO language, and we can learn so much from NeXtStep/Taligent/OpenDoc etc", rebranded to the "Linux Interface Project"… and quickly succumbed to death by scope creep. At least the GIMP people delivered.
And not having Xt also meant not having the mandatory "X" in there, so porting was assumed to be easier. But I still sometimes picture an era where Xt and its resources would be the common ground, and we'd get a good selection of widget kits you can pick from (or even combine).
As for "sane", I've seen too many Motif 1/Qt/Tk applications where the lack of proper mid-90s widgets lead to some rather interesting design choices…
I'm sad that we don't have toolkit-agnostic graphics primitives.
That could have absolutely been a thing.
Now the Wayland sessions are just schlepping pixels from the desktop of choice, and X11... is schlepping pixels painfully.
Bare X GUIs weren't pretty, but dang, they were efficient. :P
And as fugly as the Athena widgets were, they were... well... functional, in a "ooo, look at this alternative operating system GUI from a bizarre parallel-universe version of the 1980s!!!" kind of way. 😅
@rl_dane I think we had and have lots of agnostic chunks, they're just combined in ever-changing ways, with gaps at different places. If you had something like the Athena widgets, Motif or OOLIT, you had the Xlib/Xt foundation, so only the top of your software stack changed.
These days things are distributed over many platforms, so the "chunky" bits seem more in the middle, like OpenGL for drawing/blitting or Harfbuzz for fonts. Maybe XML or CSS of some kind for layout…
So it's not like the wheel is reinvented top to bottom. Sadly, that doesn't seem true for the actual things that reach the user, where mystery meat widgets are a joy to behold and you never know what surprises you get when you touch something with a rounded border.
The mystery-meat toggles are especially fun.
"The button says 'HIGH RADIATION.' Does that mean that we're currently experiencing high radiation, and I should press it to somehow shield us from radiation, or will pressing the button instantly kill us all?!?!??"
This was FIXED and working perfectly in 1984, ye flipping philistines. 
R.L. Dane 
🍵 
mhd