I agree to disagree, have a good one.

To gently disagree with you here: UI/UX work is absolutely not art,

UI without art is just a bunch of shitty buttons no one wants to press. Come to think of it, that’s one of the problems with Gimp. There is a UI, it’s just not a good one.

UX is arguably design. But most design departments would place UX as a mixed discipline.

scientific evidence as to how people see, perceive, and interact with things around them.

You’re describing Usability. This is, in fact, its own discipline that should direct both UX and UI.

The problem of poor UX in FLOSS can’t be attributed to a lack of talent; the fact is that FLOSS projects are not hospitable environments for designers, both technically and culturally.

That’s just saying it’s a lack of talent because FOSS teams are inhospitable. Blanket statements like that ring as a stereotype.

their expertise is often treated as a difference of creative opinion by developers who know nothing about basic design principles

The consumers of the product know nothing about basic design principles either. Does their opinion not matter either?

If FLOSS devs want usable interfaces (and I’m not convinced many of them do) this is the problem that needs to be solved.

So, forgive me if I’m reading too much between the lines, but what you’re saying here is if FLOSS wants better UI, they need to engage someone who says they’re an accomplished UI artist and blindly execute their vision even against their own impressions of the requested work?

Maybe there are reasons the FLOSS devs don’t want to sign up for that?

Off-Canvas Editing Paint tools can now automatically expand the width and height of a layer as you draw! You can select “Expand Layers” in the tool options to enable drawing past the current boundaries of layers.

More features such as guides and auto-expanding layers can be used to work in the off-canvas space!

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Nothing is intuitive in that software.

UI/UX is a very very difficult job. I’ve only ever known a few UI/UX artists that were any good, and OMFG, are they expensive.

You can’t just drop everything and focus on something where you don’t have domain experts. Not to presume too much about you, but that would be like saying you need to drop everything you’re doing and focus on brain surgery next year. UI/UX is art. It’s a very specific type of art that, unfortunately, doesn’t come easy for people. There are companies for hire that work professionally on UX/UI, but they’re not cheap either. Anyone can spot bad UX, but knowing how to fix it in a way that works for everyone, that’s nearly a unicorn.

I’ve been using gimp since it was released for daily driver projects.

I’ve been using Photoshop for about a decade when required for gigs.

I can get around either app pretty decently at this point.

If you drop any new user into either, they’ll be absolutely lost.

If you drop a seasoned Photoshop user into GIMP, they’ll not only be lost but be unable to use their vast array of plugins and macros and aren’t quite (but non-technically are) impossible for the average user to work on.

We can’t make Gimp Photoshop-like. We can make strides to improve Gimp, but it’s beyond reach for the current team. Maybe we can start a crowdfund to get a UX company to take a stab at it, but even at that we’d need buy in from the developers and it would likely be an incredibly large rework, not unlike the current one that took quite a long time.