I have never used anything CAD, neither I can tell much about Blender (but I’ve heard only good things about it). But I don’t think we’re necessarily need to pay people to achieve good things. Look at Photoshop. I’ve been using it since about 20 years ago, and I see very little progress, it got only worse. Yes, there’s new functionality, but come on! A trillion dollar company, two decades … is that the best they can do?

I’m genuinely curious why the whole Linux Design Tools thing gives an impression it was designed by only incompetent people. Perhaps no designers are interested in Linux or open source systems, since they don’t understand open source. But I believe the whole thing relates to that ‘just for fun’ book I’ve been reading like 20 years ago. The idea is that you want to do something, and you do that. I have some hope that macOS liquid fiasco would make some designers to consider other systems. But having a solid experience in design, I think you have to be very committed to using Linux. I’m struggling daily, and I know I could install macOS (most of my hardware is from Apple) and be done with most tasks. But I think long-term and I believe in open source systems. They have this huge advantage of nobody fucking with you by changing anything any moment. So, me, I’m trying to learn Gimp, and you know I like it in many places. But the interface, come on. Since you guys cannot / unable to just copy the most popular tool on the market anyway, why not make some okay-ish interface then? Really, what’s stopping them (I hope) is there are not many volunteers with the design experience. I could join the forces, but honestly, being like over two decades with Linux (on and off, but mostly on for the past 7 years), I have no idea where to start. I understand that I need to analyse some design tools first, understand their logic, find the pain points, and then somehow get the decision making people to listen to you.

As a demonstration, look at some Gnome File Manager (aka Nautilus) design decisions: they say they don’t want to implement ‘new tabs by default’ feature because it’ll clutter the settings, and they don’t want to have too many options there. While I agree, good strategy, they implemented some idiotic options already. My opinion, they could remove all of them. Will they do that? Of course not. Do they think in terms of UX, user workflows? I thought they do, and I like Gnome’s design decisions here and there. But some are just … it looks like there was no proper thinking put into the work.

I’d love to contribute, but generally, that takes a lot of effort. And for what? As a designer, I’m trying to avoid getting idiotic interfaces, so I’m trying to skip them altogether, with imagemagick and whatnot.

Are Gimp developers even aware their interface is the absolute worse? Are they aware GTK-3 rewrite that took them over a decade or how long, is quite overdue? I believe they are. For Gimp, I’m quite positive about their future, I hope they are too popular, even despite the name is quite idiotic (yet quite descriptive) for English speaking countries. Like come on, rename that shit, redesign that shit, perhaps you’d get more people using it, and more donations as a result.

Sometimes I think that could be a viable business strategy to start some image (ie raster) editor or vector editor, as Gimp is the worst UI wise, Krita is somewhat ok, but no Wayland, and it doesn’t look like they’re even planning. Inkscape is usable for basic svg editing, but I don’t know, it’s difficult to compare to even Adobe Illustrator CS6 (which works in wine by the way) of 20 years ago, not to say about Figma (that’s a very high bar, with billions of investors’ dollars, I understand). I have no idea of After Effects competitors. I guess Blender can be utilised somewhere. I don’t know about Houdini, perhaps it has Linux build, I don’t remember. If not, I don’t believe Linux community would get there any time soon, but Blender might have some chances some time in the future. I’ve heard good things about Godot. But that’s pretty high bar, all these tools, for an average Joe.

All the design tools, for some reason, they lack some collective understanding (do they though? Maybe they are aware) that they need to improve their UI first, as it’s borderline pathetic quite often. Is it too difficult to actually copy the proprietary competitor? You don’t need huge R&D, they did that for you, didn’t they?

Well, so, perhaps you’re right on the money issue, but I think they need to nurture some design culture, by inviting motivated people into the community. It shouldn’t be too difficult to improve those things by copying. That might be not the best thing to do, but better than what we have now.

If anybody’s involved reading this, I’m interested in improving the things, but I have no idea where to even start. I don’t have much resources jumping through the hoops, but I can be somewhat resourceful on the interfaces front. Ping me please, either here or waltesweiss at Google’s Mail.