It’s not about the software. It’s about creating a far right pipeline. Like they did with gamers and anime. Billionaires pay for users.

This is shockingly ignorant of how design actually works. The enshitification you see today is purely because of executives demanding their designers and devs jump on every new buzzword the shareholders learn this quarter.

How would changing the name make it more awkward? Giving up a huge market for no reason other than old nerds crying about a change.

And because it’s consistent. Gimp’s tools are random as all hell. It’s not just different, other tools have been designed by actual designers while Gimp’s community has been shooting them down for years. Leaving a confusing mess where shortcuts and tools have no obvious hierarchy or flow.

It’s cool it works for you but there is a reason everyone is able to learn Blender, Photoshop, Capture1, Resolve, Darktable, Krita, etc and suddenly get enraged at Gimp. I can’t think of any other project that gets this hate constantly. Darktable UI is rough too and the vibes are completely different. The Gimp community is toxic as fuck to criticism and it’ll be a miracle if there is anyone left willing to spend their precious time providing feedback. I’d love to see that change but I think as we see in the comments that many have moved on.

But for millions of people it is… the fact that it isn’t for some cultures does not negate the influence for those where it is. Companies like Apple will skip numbers and names if it’s a problem in one place (like say China) because they realize more adoption is useful. Old Gimp heads though just whine about America or some shit and wonder why nobody fucking uses it after 30 years.

Everything about this project is always saying they’re looking for input and design ideas but their old-ass users shoot down every person that has anything to say, many of whom have ideas from working as actual professionals for those same thirty years.

Kids would eat you alive.

Yeah that’s a good point, I guess our current social app structure isn’t designed at all to filter signal and noise. The art world has galleries which kind of do that at the expense of barrier to entry. Maybe things like Flathub and repos end up seen that way.

People can code publicly for themselves for sure but there is clearly a subset of people who feel like their slop is worthy of community attention and resources in the same way as traditional projects that have been proven over time. It’s the same as the Ai art slop paddlers thinking their work is as valuable when they don’t even know what’s it in. To be frank, largely parasitic people using largely parasitic tools. A lot of that community doesn’t hold those values you eloquently stated.

I think Strava is just popular due to cultural inertia more than anything. Garmin, Coros, Fitbit, Apple, even phone apps. Not really hard to export data and move. 90% of what I saw on Strava before closing the account was Zwift garbage anyway.

Self host, takes less time then you think after the initial library build. Easy to do in a weekend. If you have some money to spend on music then buy music from the artists you love. Can all be in one place, none of this exclusive garbage, quality as high as you want, can rip music that’s never been released digitally, and I think most importantly - access to your music library without an algorithm telling you what to listen to. You’ll be surprised how your listening habits change and how well you know your music after jumping off the engagement treadmill.

I mean you’re memorizing a GUI as well. I don’t work in this field at all but docker compose files are pretty straightforward even for me. Took like 15 minutes to figure out and now it’s much quicker to get set up than any other option.