This reminds me of the endless bug reports we're getting right now about the Octave GUI not being indistinguishable from Matlab. Makes me wish people weren't so inflexible about the tiniest UI differences. It's difficult to please the converts.
> Makes me wish people weren't so inflexible about the tiniest UI differences. It's difficult to please the converts.
I replaced Photoshop with Gimp years ago, but I still find Gimp incredibly painful to use. It accounts for a tiny proportion of my software use, but a massive proportion of my swearing. I use to think it was just down to being familiar with Photoshop, but I think I can only excuse it on that basis for so long.
I had the opposite experience so I can confirm it is Gimp's interface. I started with Gimp and found it painful to use. I spent hours and hours reading tutorials for basic actions. Photoshop on the other hand was easy to jump into and start using just by reading labels. You still have to read/watch tutorials but things are much better labeled and organized and you find buttons/menus where you expect them.
In the past GIMP was the winner of my personal disproportionate swearing award. That all changed when I started to use Calibre for ebook management. Calibre is far and away, the worst UI for "best in class open source software."
Inkscape is actually very good, and certainly comparable to Adobe Illustrator, if not superior nowadays. The main problem I see people have with Inkscape is when they have a MacOS computer, the only available build is from 3 years ago.
I love InkScape, but it's a little bit crashy when doing stuff like adding multiple outline borders around fonts. And the extensions are all very mysterious, slow and crash-prone when they generate insane amounts of geometry if you happen to guess the meaning of one of the parameters wrong.
Some parts of the UI are very rough to work with. The gradient editor, for instance. Sure I can use it to make any kind of gradient I want, but navigating your colour stops through a pull-down menu? Then also not marking the current colour stop in the preview gradient, means you can't see "where you are" in your gradient as the pull-down is collapsed. Makes adding colour stops very unintuitive cause you won't know where they'll appear (before or after the current point) ... there's more, but it's all this unnecessary friction for something that should be quite simple, and has been done in various better or worse ways lots of times before.
Even the latest XQuartz install appears to be 3 years old. Were you able to find a more recent one? I would be very interested if such a build existed.
It's often hard to tell the difference between bad UI and unfamiliar UI. Seems like most people agree on which side Gimp lands on. No idea which side Octave's GUI is on.
It's not that people are inflexible, it's that if you're going to provide an alternative, it should slip itself into someone's workflow and processes with almost no inertia. When someone is accustomed to hitting a keystroke to achieve a certain effect, or someone is using to having a widget in the left corner, any change to that process is going to cause discomfort, and most people don't need that.
A lot of people just never seem to become accustomed to anything in particular, so these changes don't bother them. Nothing wrong with that (it takes all sorts), except that I've a strong suspicion that it is these people who then keep changing the keyboard shortcuts, moving the icons around, poking at everything so it looks totally different, and then removing the macro functionality. Because I guess they just have no idea how traumatic this sort of thing is.
