The reason that Adobe can do AI gen "out of the box" is because you're paying for it (Firefly).

If GIMP were to implement it, they'd probably have to go the same route as Krita and either spin up or call out to a running instance of Automatic1111 or ComfyUI.

https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion

MCP would be cool, but it would be significantly harder than Blender which can represent the "world" as a formal set of expressions. MCP for GIMP would be dealing with layers of rasterized data which would mean integrating with YOLO/LLava/etc in order to make sense of it. It would be neat, but it'd be a daunting integration and potentially VERY VERY slow.

Looks like they created a separate gimp-ux repository a few mos ago at least. I'd gladly contribute design work and code there if my experiences would be more collaborative and less painful than they were before I just gave up trying like a decade ago. In my experience, anyone making a design contribution could only do it in a discrete standalone PR-- with gimp's foundational lack of UI design, that's like someone that owns a crumbling dam saying they will only accept proposals to fix individual broken spots because the pieces that are still intact work just fine. The only real options were to make a fork and change it, or... go fork yourself-- and there was no way I was taking on all of that design and coding myself.

> But there's a price to pay.

And I resent the fact that I'm expected to pay that price when I'm not the one who was losing projects.

And as I said, carrying out the instruction but then telling me that I should be using Export instead would be acceptable. Refusing to carry out the instruction, even though the software has identified and understood the instruction just because I failed to say 'Simon Says' is not acceptable.

(Hi, by the way! I think you did some translations for PhotoPrint and CMYKTool some years back?)

The sad thing is that the current car-crash state of GIMP's UI is what, 15 years after they received the input of a professional HCI designer? In some ways it's improved a great deal in that timespan, and in others it got significantly worse. To this day it lectures you like some bratty kid playing Simon Says if you try to use File -> Save to save a TIFF image. (Complying with my instruction and then telling me why Export would have been better is fine. Recognising and understanding the instruction but refusing to comply with it is not fine.)

> a) have a working mental model of software functioning, so they reason about interfaces differently

You're 100% correct, they do reason about interfaces differently, and thus have wants and needs which are different from those of non-technical users. Those wants and needs are not met by mainstream software, but are met in some OSS software, so it should come as no surprise that such types want to defend that software against the incursion of those who want to make it just like the mainstream offerings!

Like you I have a slightly different perspective here, having been a hobbyist software developer for some years, but having worked in print and design as a day job.

But I still bemoan such things as the awful keyboard handling of the current GTK file dialog, when compared with the old GTK1.2 file dialog. The old one was truly hideous to look at, but handled filtering files by keystroke far better than any current file dialog.

Truly bummed about this one.

I’d been learning CAD with Ondsel, and have printed off half-a-dozen of my models to help around the house.

If this comment finds its way to the team, I just want to say thanks.

The topo naming fix and the assembly workbench were enormous contributions to the community that will be with us always.

But I really believed in Ondsel’s vision for an online repo for 3d models.

I've completed huge projects on FreeCAD. Highly recommended.

I imagine lots of complaints are either outdated, or by people who are used to different CAD systems and expect them to work exactly the same.

I've tried and worked with Catia, solidworks, and fusion 360, and I can easily complain about each of those for being confusing.