If this sounds like a plane of the future, it isn’t.

They weren’t wrong.

It’s too niche to be a hive of activity on a platform this small, but [email protected] does exist!

This is bad news for Lesotho, Gambia, San Marino, and Brunei.

Gorgonzola, walnuts, capers, olives, chipotle flakes, and a little grated vintage cheddar please. If that doesn’t fit into the pizza man’s pizza plan, don’t trust the pizza man.

About a kilometer, if it was on the docks.

I think a lot of people underestimate the maintenance burden of options like this. It’s another trope you see often with UI changes – “just let me switch it back.”

The problem is that now, even if your UI is super nicely decoupled from your engine, everything you change under the hood is likely to need at least regression testing in two places rather than one – that workload has doubled.

As it happens, though, with your specific example, there’s someone actively maintaining a GIMP fork mod called PhotoGIMP to achieve this, but I notice despite recent(ish) commits, they’re still a minor version and a year behind.

Ironically, this attitude is a major blocker for the GIMP team when it comes to bigger UI/UX changes – there’s a vocal contingent who will react negatively to any change that requires a little adjustment to workflow or muscle memory, or even if things just look different.

Firefox’s incredibly light-touch visual changes recently are a great example of this; it’s not “this is demonstrably worse,” it’s “change makes me uncomfortable.”

I do totally appreciate that changes can be genuinely problematic for a subset of users, especially the elderly, but the vitriol that gets spewed when a project overhauls a UI embarrasses me as a user.

Side note: the GIMP UI is generally pretty good these days. There’s room for improvement, and it has a learning curve (as do all complex applications, to some degree) but it’s shed a lot of its least intuitive aspects.

I’m not saying you can’t hate them, but I am saying that all you’ll achieve by that is getting angry all the time.

You’re fighting the tide. There’s never been a point in time where language had fixed, immutable definitions. It’s always been transient, no matter what you learned, and it’s not a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just how communication and culture work.

Just wanted to chime in and say that OP’s experience is exactly how it would go down at my workplace too, despite the deluge of downvotes they’re getting, and I also likely would have looked at alternatives instead of proposing it, for the sake of my professional reputation. I think it’s likely true for a ton of people.

That’s not to say that people aren’t being over-serious if they see the original branding and balk at it, but that’s out of OP’s hands.