the epiphany moment was when the dev team stopped listening to the neckbeards that wanted things different for the sake of them being different, and started listening to professionals that wanted more sane workflows. There must be a reason if all industry does things simillar ways, other than inertia.
Guess what, user adoption increased dramatically, because it became pleasant (or tolerable) to use by people that used literally any other program.
V8 included in the core many things that were plugins before, and replaced the old utilities that the neckbeards in the forum were crying to keep, or else! (or else more adoption.)
V9 had even more many improvements, but also many regressions, over V8. V10 might be the release that truly consolidates the core of the suite and then they can start really focus on high speed designs.
I've navigated many programs over my career, and unless a future employer mandates me to use Altium, or purely technical reasons (8+ layer, high speed designs) requires me to use Cadence, only kicad for me.
Incidentally, it feels like this past two years freeCAD GIMP and Inkscape have started moving away from listening to noisy members of the community, to useful members of the community. I'm seeing a slow but steady progress that will eventually accelerate and make both toold true alternatives, as it happened with KiCAD (though it will really be tough for GIMP, even if it's perfectly usable for many, many tasks, any graphic designer will kick and scream if they're not given the adobe suite, pity.)
Myself, i do very little basic graphics like replicate buttons and such things to not bother my colleague, or apply correction to my photos, i proudly do that in GIMP and inkscape.
"Complaining neckbeards" are a part of the problem, but the bigger issue is often developer-users that has oversight (or preference due to "control") with shitty UI-decisions that have little interest or agency in fixing them. The non-movment complainers are more of an alibi for those developers with little UI improvement interests.
GIMP is just bad sadly even when it comes to basics, it has nothing to do with wanting Adobe products but more about GIMP just being a "coders-tool".
Every time in the last decade I checked, i still had to input a resolution when creating a new image layer.. that's a fundamental operation that hasn't been that clumsy in Photoshop since the 90s (Photoshop has "infinite" layers, they can be larger than the image, yes it's "bloated" but that's what you want as an artist 90% of the time.. not an annoying border).
> The non-movment complainers are more of an alibi for those developers with little UI improvement interests.
True, but i also remember vehement discussions on everybody else in the world that wanted the scroll / zoom to work as in every other software in the world, and a few vocal users that would spam every thread and discussion insisting that we (the rest of the world) should have been using other software instead.
You know, the usual hostile attitude open source communities are famous for. I guess that for GIMP the moment that will change everything is when they will add a proper circle tool /s
GIMP and Inkscape are already moving in the right direction with the new UIs, fingers crossed
Blender went from a shitshow way worse than GIMP to almost killing the competition. Those working on GIMP took notice (and perhaps those that had felt sidelined before dared speak up).
Guess what, user adoption increased dramatically, because it became pleasant (or tolerable) to use by people that used literally any other program.
V8 included in the core many things that were plugins before, and replaced the old utilities that the neckbeards in the forum were crying to keep, or else! (or else more adoption.)
V9 had even more many improvements, but also many regressions, over V8. V10 might be the release that truly consolidates the core of the suite and then they can start really focus on high speed designs.
I've navigated many programs over my career, and unless a future employer mandates me to use Altium, or purely technical reasons (8+ layer, high speed designs) requires me to use Cadence, only kicad for me.
Incidentally, it feels like this past two years freeCAD GIMP and Inkscape have started moving away from listening to noisy members of the community, to useful members of the community. I'm seeing a slow but steady progress that will eventually accelerate and make both toold true alternatives, as it happened with KiCAD (though it will really be tough for GIMP, even if it's perfectly usable for many, many tasks, any graphic designer will kick and scream if they're not given the adobe suite, pity.)
Myself, i do very little basic graphics like replicate buttons and such things to not bother my colleague, or apply correction to my photos, i proudly do that in GIMP and inkscape.