I'm not good enough to fix it, but I hope one day a team of great programmers simply restart from scratch. If they simply copied Affinity's or Photoshop's UI and core functionality, we'd have a winner.
I say all this to give some context to the following: GIMP is just not great software. It is super unintuitive and when you don't use it for a while, you totally forget how to use it to select things, put them on layers, etc.
I use Pixelmator on Mac. I bought it years ago and haven't regretted it. It is getting better and better of the years, the UI is great. When I use linux I miss Pixelmator more than I do Photoshop. So if someone were to create a Pixelmator-inspired editor for linux, that would be great.
I used it today for doing a color range selection to get an estimate for parameters to use in image magick. It had the easiest dynamic visualization of the matte for the selected range as I was selecting. It did exactly what I needed, very well.
I also tested out krita and nuke. Was easier in gimp.
But gimp is still the tool of last resort as it is just so painful to use. I wish there was a more positive engagement between the graphics community and the gimp devs. It feels very combative and negative compared with tools like krita and blender.
As a GIMP / Inkscape user who hasn't used photoshop / illustrator, what is so much better about Adobe's offerings?
In ~1998, GIMP was not quite as good as Photoshop 5 and was more awkward to use, but you could see how it could close the gap. It had impressive underlying tech that could handle large images on computers at the time. There was an expansive library of weird and neat plug-ins and scripts. It felt like we were at the start of a great shift in which OSS software would "catch up" and eventually replace desktop power tools, just as Linux had done with web servers. It was... the year of Linux on the Desktop!
By ~2005, GIMP was starting to really catch up to where Photoshop was in 1998, but Photoshop had added lots of quality of line features like adjustment layers and layer effects, way better text rendering, and amazing new features like spot healing brushes, vanishing point warping, etc. The gap was widening. But GIMP still did all the core stuff, and Photoshop was annoying users by shoving Adobe Bridge down their throat, etc. So people were still hopeful for a replacement.
By ~2012, GIMP was adding.. an awkward single window mode? It lacked tons of by-now-basic features that made it totally impractical for professional use. Photoshop, meanwhile, was adding amazing time-saving features like Content-Aware Patch and Move that seemed "magic" at the time. The tech gap was widening, but Adobe was also pushing subscriptions down users' throats, which was very unpopular, so GIMP still had a chance to make a come back.
By ~2018, GIMP was finally adding.. basic CMYK support for printing, something which literally no one uses GIMP for professionally and was a dying need? Meanwhile, Photoshop was demoing an AI object selection tool that could magically select objects without needing to trace them, which came out in 2019. Using GIMP felt like using software from a decade previous.
The last 5 years have been the worst for GIMP. Photoshop has been improving at an astonishing rate. Now it's literally what photo editing looked like in 90's movies - you just open an image, click "select object" and it perfectly selects it, and lets you move/drag/add elements with AI, etc. You can do edits in seconds now that used to take hours, and the results are really good.
None of this is a complaint about GIMP or all the people who contributed to it. It's impossible for a few volunteers to complete with infinite money and hundreds of full-time employees. But Photoshop and GIMP are no longer in the same league. And Adobe knows this, which is why it can get away with punitive subscription-only pricing.
I see that GIMP has since gotten a UI revamp, but the multiple window UI from the time I used it was also unbearably bad and one of the main things that sticks out in my memory.
But Gimp developers: implementing batch in one go is a big ask I know. But a great first step might be to create a channel in Gimp where correct script-fu is emitted for operations in progress. Being able to connect to that from outside would allow 3rd party projects to assemble "record by doing" macros that could be turned into Photoshop-like batch capability.
Macros are on the roadmap (https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#macros-script-recor...), and in fact we did a lot of prepwork for them during 3.0's development (internally, several features like filters and plug-ins now have configs that store settings, which will be used by macros in the future to repeat operations).
I do agree though, even the revamped UI does not have a great look and feel, but I'm used to it so I don't mind.
The multiple window thing is also a toggle setting.
The application is perfectly fine for my needs and I'm ok with the ui.
But if you want something else, you can change that.
So grab the source code, try to get it to compile and run, and start making changes.
You have the freedom to do so. Use it. It doesn't matter that you're not great. Just do. No need to wait for others.
But it's really poorly designed and outdated. I completely understand and sympathize with anyone trying to use GIMP for the first time.