If only they had functional data backup and export on non-Android platforms…

Yup. Lest we forget, Android is Linux-based, and it’s the most popular consumer operating system in the world.

Wow, the level of detail on this theme is really impressive!

As as aside, I didn’t realize that GTK had officially banned theming. That seems…dumb.

I remember people constantly asking for that to be a feature on Reddit, but I don’t believe it was ever implemented.

Anyway, I wasn’t aware that GIMP UX suffers, I’ve never used anything else and am happy with it.

My argument here is that by never having used anything else, you wouldn’t necessarily realize how much better other UX choices could have been.

That said, I do have to give the devs some credit, as they have fixed two major issues, by adding single-window-mode and unifying the transform tools. Having each transform be its own separate tool was just awful UX IMO.

The biggest remaining UX problem, in my opinion, is the way GIMP forces layers to have fixed boundaries. Literally no other layer-based image editor has fixed layer boundaries, because it makes very little sense as a concept. Layers should solely be defined by their content, not by arbitrary layer properties set in a dialog box.

Honestly I feel like this attitude is the reason GIMP’s UX suffers. They’re so determined to be “not like photoshop” that they’re unwilling to fix some of their more boneheaded UI decisions out of fear that they’d be seen as copying photoshop.

Remember that Android is Linux-based – so keeping that in mind, a massive amount of normal users use Linux on a daily basis.

I think the key is, operating systems are meant to exist in the background. If it’s working well, you don’t think about it at all.

I’ve said this elsewhere, but I don’t really agree with the article’s premise about what happened to XMPP.

XMPP was a niche thing before Google appeared, and it remained a niche thing after Google left. That said, it would have been much better had Google continued to support it!

Not yet, but they’ve said it will be. Personally I’m excited to see “mainstream” social media using ActivityPub, but you’ll find that it’s quite a divisive issue.