I have not used either, but I can say that Krita’s UI is closer to Photoshop than GIMP’s appears to be. That might be why people are opting for that application, for the sense of familiarity if they were trained on Photoshop.

I will say that any application which is used for digital painting should also be good at image manipulation, so if Krita does both well, I can see why it would be preferred over GIMP if the painting tools are lacking.

Looking over the screenshots, for GIMP, I am hoping that is not the default layout of tools. Having a jumbled block of icons is a lot harder to visually parse than a stack of pairs. I also find myself wondering why they use up so much space on the left to include a weird cutout of their mascot above the tools.

On the right, I am also not sure why the layer thumbnails are pushed so far to the right when they could be immediately adjacent to the visibility toggle.

It doesn’t look terrible to me, but I am not surprised that people using an app for visual design might be more critical of design flaws in the app itself.

UI is dated, for one.

range inputs can’t be scrolled, dragged around the screen, and are absurdly small on high DPI screens.

There’s a load of UX issues, such as how pasting content will create a new layer that is for some reason more limited than a typical layer.

Feature discoverability is poor. Most features are buried in years-old dropdown tabs that aren’t kept up to date with UI/UX expectations.

Some features are incredibly obtuse in how they explain themselves: selecting a brush dynamic selects stuff from a massive scrolling list with nothing but a title to explain what they do.

UI is inconsistent. Some elements are clearly older than others even after ““recent”” (years-old) updates.

There’s way more, btw. But honestly if this years-long push to get GIMP to GTK 3 has told me anything, it’s that the project should’ve canned the update years ago and written an entirely new app from scratch, dropping the technical debt, the archaic choice of language and UI toolkit, and they still would’ve come out with a new version faster than they have now.

Now admittedly I’m not someone who often uses drawing programs, but my biggest issue in GIMP is that I never seem to be able to find what I’m looking for.

In the two images you posted you can actually see an example of such a case. In Krita all the tools (or whatever you’d call them) in the bar on the left are ordered in a logical way, and separate types of tools are also visually separated by separator lines. The bar with tools is also only 2 icons wide, which makes scanning for the right tool a bit easier, since you can mostly just scan along the vertical axis. In GIMP it’s just a pile of low contrast icons in seemingly random order. Unless you’ve used it enough to know the order, you’re gonna have to do a lot more searching. And searching will be way harder since you’ll have to search horizontally and vertically.

It’s like reading a website where the text is taking the whole with of the screen and without paragraphs (GIMP) vs reading a website where the line length is constrained, the text is horizontally centered, and there are proper paragraphs.

I feel like this example reflects my personal experience with both. I’ve used quite a few different types of image editing programs, and with most of them I can fairly easily find the stuff I need. Using GIMP however, I used to be quite lost. Nowadays it’s gotten better because the windows are not all floating around and I’ve used it more. But still, I only found Krita after using a fair bit of GIMP, and yet I felt instantly more at home because the UI was easier to navigate.

Edit: That being said, GIMP is a very cool program. I don’t want to hate on it too much. It’s helped me countless times. The UI has already improved a lot since the floaty window days, and I hope that continues.

It’s not what the buttons look like, it’s what they do. In Krita, making an ellipse involves clicking the ellipse button and dragging it somewhere. You now have an ellipse, and you hold shift if you want to make it a circle instead.

In GIMP there is no direct ellipse tool, there’s only an ellipse select tool, likewise you hold shift to make it a circle. Then you use a menu item to select the border of your selection, getting a popup to let you determine how much pixels you want. And then, you use the fill tool or fill menu item to fill it. That’s a surprising amount of clicks to accomplish what’s most likely the single most common task for anyone opening a screenshot in an image editor. I’m not aware of any easier/faster method to do it. Feels like it should exist, but this is also what you get if you search for how to draw a circle in GIMP, so if it exists everyone’s missing it.

GIMP’s method gives you more power, but you rarely ever need that power. But when you do, Krita also has ellipse select, border select and various fill tools that can be strung together in the same way.

I have trouble with both, but more experience with GIMP. I can’t stand all the little tool buttons with no text. I want the name of each tool always visible on its button.

I have the same problem with Inkscape.

I’m just looking through this entire thread, and call me crazy, OP, but you seem angry not more people are using GIMP. You’re quite aggressive about it, attempting to shut down legitimate UI and UX concerns at every corner, and it is genuinely fatiguing to see.

This sounds a lot like how people would use windows paint for simple things over photoshop. Many folks just want a simplified tool. I was estatic to find out firefox now gives simple pdf editing capabilities instead of me importing it into libre office draw.

Every time I install gimp in an attempt to switch over, I find myself frustrated that the tools I commonly use on other programs are not either available by default or unintuitive enough that 20 minutes of looking through tools, tabs, and menus has not provided the results I went looking for.

I try every few years, or every major update, whichever happens first.

GIMP feels non-intuitive sometimes.

For example, layers.

I expect that GIMP internally has a list of all objects that I added to the file. Like, text, brush drawings, pasted images. Instead, I cannot find that list anywhere.

I like it

The default toolbox placement is should be conform with other design software.

Sure, people can figure it out once they tried it, but majority of them will move to another software that has familiar experience out of the box.

When people asking me to install GIMP, I always change it to this layout, making it more familiar to another software like Inkscape, Krita, Affinity suites, Photoshop (and other Adobe software), etc.

I think it’s all about use case. I’m not 100% sure but the way I use GIMP probably wouldn’t work in Krita. I use GIMP mainly for removing backgrounds so they are transparent, as well as converting raster images to paths so I can make dxf’s of them. This is very easy and fast in GIMP. I think it all just depends on use case.

I remember when i first started using GIMP the thing that threw me the most was that there was no ‘safe default’ state that you could get to by pressing escape, like ‘select’ is for other programs.

If you think this is a small thing consider that escape/back is one of the only 3 default controls on phone UIs. It’s super important and Gimp doesn’t have it.

I can never put my finger on why I don’t stick with GIMP. I install it on every machine I own, and occasionally use it to open a file and export to another file format.

From time to time, I tell myself I will finally sit down and just only use GIMP. Finally learn the tool. Envitably I find myself googling to find every tool, and then I will come across something simple, like making a red rectangle, and I end up having to google how to do it, and then get frustrated that I can’t just draw a box and quit.

There are probably legit reasons for the decisions, but if it kills my workflow, I can’t afford to use it.

As others have mentioned, it’s simple things takes alot time finding/figuring out.

I use GIMP within Ubuntu MATE few times a week to edit pictures. Simple edits nothing major.

One of the thing I need regularly is to highlight certain part of the picture.

Now in Microsoft Paint I can draw a rectangle, choose its border thickness, and color in 2 seconds.

I have learned how to do the same in GIMP few times but it took alot of time and I still forgets after few weeks.

So now I just reboot the PC and log into Windows or use Windows virtual machine and draw rectangle in 2 seconds in Microsoft Paint.

Mine is extremely simple use case, so I can only guess how difficult or how time consuming it would be for actual professional to create artistic work in GIMP vs Photoshop (or in similar commercial software).

Just my 2 cents.