[grapeskin]

Honestly, if there have been decades of efforts and it’s still this bad, that’s even less motivation to give them money.

It’s like: if you’re a large manufacturer, would you prefer investing in a city where government officials pocket the cash and roads don’t exist but with handwavy excuses that something might improve with a little more cash, or invest literally anywhere else where the roads improve every year and things are getting cleaner?

Gimp seems to be spinning its tires for infinity. I’ve tried it once a year or so for 15 years. It hasn’t changed much. It’s incredible. Almost no company is going to throw them cash and it’s obvious why.

[prokoudine]

Your analogy falls short for a very predictable reason. There are exactly zero paid developers in the GIMP project.

The right kind of an analogy would be an investor stumbling upon a tiny community of developers that has been serving hundreds of thousands of users for the past 25+ years without pay.

[prmoustache]

I am pretty sure they would welcome your pull request.

[Arisaka1]

Being able to open a PR and getting accepted to be merged are 2 totally different things.

IMO, one of the core reasons why UI/UX in open source applications (that aren't backed or actively contributed by dedicated staff in big companies that keeps them on a salary for the sole purpose of contributing) is because it's more widely accepted for programmers to contribute to open source than UI/UX designers.

In this case the best one can do is design mockups, but then who implements it? Who even has to be convinced that the mockup is a step forward or backwards, the moment every design decision is treated as having the same value as the next one, on the grounds of "it's just an opinion"?

My point is, we don't lack programmers/developers we lack UI/UX people willing to contribute, and we also lack the former to actually listen to what they have these people to say instead of dismissing their suggestions as "not data driven enough", "too opinionated" etc.

[grapeskin]

Mentioned that in my first comment.

There’s perfectly good software out there. I’d rather get work done and use that, than spend forever trying to make sense of some mess of an ancient project’s code and trying to fix it. There are even free projects with usable UI that would be a better use of time if I were to want to contribute to something. Krita’s been mentioned here a few times and it seems to have a brighter future.