Oh, I know (I am a greying wizard), but why should the editor care? In theory, it should assume XCF, with the opened JPEG as the first layer.

Instead, it’s gotchas and RTFM. Which is sadly a very poor approach when developing a tool used by creatives who are vastly less likely to RTFM than the engineers making the tool.

Manually adding alpha channels to layers… I’ve seen so many people knock their heads against GIMP because, for whatever reason, they didn’t just add the channel by default. (Okay, sure it’s probably the default if you’re starting with a blank file but the background layer doesn’t have one and if you start by opening a jpg, then subsequent layers won’t have alpha because… reasons…)

I don’t think it’s because they don’t have UX designers, it’s because they only solicit feedback from existing users rather than researching new user experience and watching how a new user gets on with the program.

I also think very few Adobe or Affinity power users get stuck into GIMP etc because they bounce off it so quickly. So they never get feedback from the very users they want to convince to move over.

Inkscape and GIMP etc are fine tools in their own right (I have had them installed for years) but where things have always broken down is when you’re working in larger teams and working towards a larger goal.

Inkscape, GIMP, Krita, LibreOffice is an awful chain when you compare it to say Affinity where you can shift between vector, pixel, and layout workflows within the same tool (or copy and paste seamlessly across Adobe tools).

Until the FOSS community sits down and works with creatives and end users who don’t use the tools (which Audacity did thanks to Tantacrul and the results speak for themselves), we’ll be stuck with proprietary tools.

The problem is when new users turn up to give feedback to say Inkscape for some of their weirdness like opening a blank doc each time the app opens, different tabs for fill and stroke color, weird behavior with fonts changing when you backspace out to an empty box, blah blah, the community goes “skill issue” or “this isn’t Adobe”.

Yet they fail to understand the design decisions as to why other products have more obvious behaviour patterns - they want the tool to be relatively self explanatory and try and align to user expectations as much as possible.

Tantacrul did a great talk at FOSS Backstage Design conference that is really worth watching if you’re interested in the topic.