For what it's worth, there's been a lot of turnover in developers in the last 20 years. I've read some comments on older issue reports, and it made me understand why people think GIMP developers are abrasive (even though that hasn't been my experience with the current developers)
I'll say that I got a lot of encouragement and help when I started working on non-destructive editing - there was definitely no one on the team dismissing it (except for some users, oddly enough)
The first section after the recent news on the home pages says "High Quality Photo Manipulation: GIMP provides the tools needed for high quality image manipulation. From retouching to restoring to creative composites, the only limit is your imagination."
That seems clear enough to me about our focus, though one thing I've learned since I've started contributing is that whatever you think is clear enough, probably isn't!
(Hopefully that doesn't come across as sarcastic - I mean it sincerely. I've helped out with writing news posts and been amazed at seeing how people interpret sections I thought were perfectly clear. It's been a learning experience!)
We do - we state exactly what GIMP is and what we aim for. That doesn't stop people from having their own conceptions.
The "more like MS Paint" group tends to be longtime users who often prefer the destructive editing approach of GIMP 2. We try to respect people who currently use the software, while also trying to implement new features as intended on the roadmap.
Given the number of great open source art programs today, I don't think we're keeping anyone from doing anything. :)
I think the challenge is that there are so many expectations. From reading and responding to issue reports, it seems like a group of people expect us to be Photoshop and another group expects us to be MS Paint - and making one group happy (non-destructive editing, for instance) annoys the other group. :)
GIMP is meets a lot of people's needs though (though we can always do that better). I'm in the process of transcribing interviews by GIMP's maintainer from professional artists who use GIMP and other free/libre software in their workflows, and it's really interesting to see what they're able to do.
I believe it's a step up from "design by whichever developer implemented a particular feature", which was the norm. :)
More seriously, we're trying to attract more designers and design feedback, just like we do for coding. We're also trying to document UX standards (see https://developer.gimp.org/core/ for early work) so there'll be a consistent experience as new developers join and features are added.
What version of GIMP are you running? Stable GIMP at this point (at least by our definition) is GIMP 3.2, which definitely has this feature. If you've been using 2.10 or earlier, then yeah, it wouldn't be in there.
Copy & Paste default behavior was changed in GIMP 3.0 (I was one of the people who worked on the change). GIMP 2.10 and earlier creating floating selections as described earlier.
I've gotten equal parts praise and complaints for working on that - some people think it makes GIMP much more intuitive, while others find it interfers with their workflow of quickly copying, editing, and merging back down pieces of a layer.
Non-destructive resize works on vector layers and link layers (essentially "smart objects" in GIMP). We have the capability to do this for regular layers too - just need to connect some things and change some internal assumptions about transform filters.
Possibly as part of our in-progress extension platform. The extension infrastructure is already built (e.g. you could package the theme as .gex file and have GIMP recognize it), and we have a GSoC student working on some aspects of it (at the moment, the submission workflow for an online repo of extensions). Once it's ready, we could reach out to the developers of PhotoGIMP and see if they'd be willing to have it included as part of the initial extensions repo - then you could pull it into GIMP directly.
We then discuss and test with the reporter and volunteer designers, and try to implement once some consensus has been reached. We welcome feedback from more users, so feel free to contribute your thoughts and design/workflow issues!
We want to make macros simpler (some of the work I helped out with for GIMP 3.0 was to lay the groundwork for automated/recordable operations), but as with all the things on our roadmap it takes time and developers.
And rectangles, triangles, and other custom shapes too I hope! :)
I'll do my best. I might actually finish cleaning up the code for the version in the video and post a WIP merge request so people can start trying it out and designing how the interactions should work.
That's up to you. Right now filters work the same way - you can merge them automatically on creation, merge them at some point while working, or merge them on export. For formats like PSD, we'll eventually add the option to export as non-destructive filters as well.
We don't want to take away choices - we just want to add more options for people's workflows.
Yes, it's planned for transform tools and already possible with filters. Technically our transform tools are already capable of this (they use GEGL operations the same as our non-destructive filters). We just need to tweak it to not immediately commit the transform, and then implement a UI.
That was a feature in GTK2 (the GUI library we use) that was removed in GTK3.
We could try to fight the library and reimplement it ourselves, but it'd take a developer dedicated to do it. I miss the menu icons too. :(
If you mean the color icons, you can easily switch back to those in the Welcome Dialog that appears when you first open GIMP (look in the Personalize tab). It's the first thing I do when I install GIMP on a new machine. :)
I can't speak for all of us, but generally no (in terms of GenAI at least). There are concerns about generated code not being compatible with GPL, and honestly a lot of the drive-by GenAI coded merge requests tend to not work.
The current non-destructive UI is a bit of a compromise - we can't really mix layers with NDE filters in the layer dock until GTK4 (from what I understand), so the pop-up menu is what we had to work with.
You can check "Merge filter" at the bottom of the filter dialogue though, and it will automatically merge the filter like in 2.10 (and the setting is remembered going forward)
I'll say that I got a lot of encouragement and help when I started working on non-destructive editing - there was definitely no one on the team dismissing it (except for some users, oddly enough)