this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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@kde@floss.social @kde@lemmy.kde.social
I support people trying new things! I hate Adobe!
However, all of the tools here, save for Blender and maybe Kdenlive, are lacking somewhat in either features or UX. Inkscape is not comparable to Illustrator in my recent experience, and even Krita, while decent, has some weird decisions that don't make much sense from a workflow perspective.
I commonly hear criticism met with either "Add the feature yourself, it's open source" (I am a visual artist with experience using digital art tools, not a C++ programmer) or "It's not supposed to replace <comparable software>" (then your software might as well not bother competing if it's not going to work much better than the other options). I have a necessity to switch, but I can't use these tools yet if they don't behave how I need them to, often how swaths of other competing software behaves. I'm willing to curb my expectations, I don't expect things to be *perfect*, but the amount of configuration I need to do to get similar workflows like comparable software is rough. I think once that gets addressed, more people will be interested in switching.
I'm so convinced it isn't even a feature issue, more of a look and feel with sane defaults sort of issue.
Don't take this the wrong way. While I appreciate the tact with which you have expressed your criticisms, but you may find that your objections all boil down to "I am used to a certain set of tools and now I have to change. The new tools do things differently and I am confused and it is messing with my productivity", that is, the problem is not entirely with the new software, but with you, your workflow and your muscle memory.
The issue comes when trying to convince many people used to the old tools to adopt the new one. Having to un- and relearn your skills is a massive UX hurdle. That's not an issue of the users, but of the application not catering to that use case (encouraging people to switch and easing them into the new environment). Every difficulty, every extra step you have to take, every workflow habit you have to adapt is a detriment.
The tools can be great in a vacuum, but when we're talking about people switching, they're no longer in a vacuum.
I agree. That said, users coming from proprietary tools may be gracious enough to meet the volunteers building free software at least half way.