VLC is pretty damn crusty, especially to anyone not familiar with that particular....design ethos.

Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible endeavor and the developers deserve endless praise, but for people that aren't already familiar with navigating things like GIMP, KDE, Open/LibreOffice, it's not especially welcoming.

> for people that aren't already familiar with navigating things like GIMP, KDE, Open/LibreOffice, it's not especially welcoming.

This is true for all complex software, though. People who have never used Apple's software also struggle with it until they become more familiar.

Is VLC really "complex software" if you just want to use it as a media player? Double click your media file, it plays. Play, pause, volume controls are where you'd guess they are. There's plenty of complexity underneath, but the happy path is simple.

By contrast, "open this image and draw a single red circle in it" in GIMP is as challenging to a newbie as quitting vi. Even for an intermediate user - I use GIMP a handful of times per year and I absolutely could not tell you from memory how to do that.

> Is VLC really "complex software"

The moment you criticize an app, someone on the Internet will jump in to tut-tut and insist to you that it's "complex software" and you can't possibly understand how complex it is. Case in point: Just a few years ago the Windows Terminal team chastised[^1] users by claiming that fast font rendering would literally require several PhDs of research and can't be solved otherwise[^0]. At some point we have to realize that claiming something is complex doesn't prove that it's inherently complex nor justify any complexity in how it was built.

[^0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687

[^1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...

You missed the updates to the text rendering story. The guy who requested the feature then went ahead and implemented the feature in a weekend.

Something like a year later, Microsoft did actually improve the behavior and never credited the guy who proved it was possible.

> The guy who requested the feature then went ahead and implemented the feature in a weekend. Something like a year later, Microsoft did actually improve the behavior and never credited the guy who proved it was possible.

Thanks for telling me about that development. I'm … speechless.

They eventually did credit "the guy," Casey Muratori, who's a very accomplished game engine developer. He has a series called Handmade Hero where he writes an engine and game from scratch and streams it live.

I've used VLC forever and I had no idea there is anything more to it than playing media. It always seems to have the most recent codecs, so it doesn't seem crusty to me.

I've used VLC for a long time as well, and while I wouldn't call it crusty, I would call it odd. Powerful, super capable, but doesn't seem to follow standard conventions. Honestly, it's odd but I would rather they don't do some overhaul to standardize or modernize it. Software, hardware, etc. don't have to be homogenous or turn into bland corporate-ware.

Even when just opening a single video file it tries to do way too much at once.

Why is there a playlist by default? What are these dozens of obscure options at the first level under every main dropdown in the title/menu bar?

I vaguely remember recently trying mpv and being pleasantly surprised, but I mostly use QuickTime or IINA on macOS. mpv seems to be available cross-platform though; maybe the Windows port is usable?

> Why is there a playlist by default?

Is there? I know the feature but I thought it was off by default and I think it's this way on my computers.

Yeah mpv is great on win; I switched from VLC because VLC had trouble with playback combined with large subtitle offsets. mpv just works and the couple things I need for UI were easily configured as hotkeys

I love mpv and for iPhone recommend Outplayer (1), a player built on mpv and ffmpeg. It’s been flawless, just like mpv on desktop.

1: https://outplayer.app/

Desktop recording, video format conversion, streaming server, playing from network streams(in the name...).

I am no expert but these things I've done in limited amounts. Mostly I just double click a file and watch it though.

Go poking around in the menus and GUI there's a bunch of stuff in there.

It feels like GIMP was designed with user-hostility in mind. There’s no Paint.net for Linux, so I have to use GIMP from time to time for my gui server job needs. And gosh, I hate the damn thing. Every simple step in it is as hard as you can’t bear.

(No I can’t use Krita for specific reasons and it isn’t much easier anyway)

Try Kolourpaint for this use case.

If you want to annotate screenshots, KDE's screenshot tool, Spectacle, has this built in too.

Thanks for the advice!

I always thought this, but used it for a while for work and found it was actually quicker work-flow-wise than Photoshop (though Photoshop was better for photo editing) or Krita (and krita is way better for painting).

It was like, hidden underneath the janky gui, there was actually a lot of thought put into how things work together.

Have you tried a photopea? Its an online app.

If Krita isn't easy enough, then Photoshop isn't gonna be any easier. (assuming we are talking about simple/common stuff...)

100% agree.

VLC is simple as pie. open folder, click music or video, it plays. drag files to it, it adds them to the playlist. same functionality as WinAmp, etc.

I had to watch three (3) youtube tutorials to figure out how to import a pdf and copy-paste a signature to it.

I agree. I too am a VLC hater. It's not just crusty, but often buggy and worse[1] than alternatives (I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema myself, despite it being dead for almost a decade). VLC is also ugly in a non-platform specific way. It's like a web app developed before web apps were a thing and doesn't feel at home in either Windows, MacOS, or Linux.

Having said that, VLC is still my last resort when nothing else can play a file.

[1] One example is subtitle rendering. Last I checked VLC was just plain uglier than MPC-HC.

That's called Qt, and Qt is awesome, notably because it's fast. (Web apps wish they were this fast !)

Also, please tell me you are not trying to take the standard IBM desktop Interface (File, Edit...) away ?

The cloud portals are rediculously slow. It's almost like I'm on a free tier paying $20k per month.

The only problem I've ever run into with VLC was on their Android app they hid the audio sync setting for basically no reason. Other than that, I've never had a problem with it. Maybe i just haven't been exposed to the magic of perfect media players but VLC is vastly more feature rich than the defaults, "just works", and i don't think it looks bad at all!

In today's modern world of "UI Overhauls" (read: fucking everything up and taking away every useful power you had in the name of 'usability') it's basically god tier. The damn thing is stable, that's literally all i need. I'll learn the interface, just for the love of God don't change it every time i get used to it!

MPC-HC ain't dead. It's still getting a couple updates a month.

https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases

You critics stay away from VLC. I swear if I have to deal with another "modern" UI implementation.

Have you used VLC on MacOS tho? Full screen video looks very slick and is tough to differentiate from native quicktime other than having support for more codecs and features.

The non full screen UI is a little more crusty but still looks better than the windows version imo.

I don't think GIMP is a fair comparison to any of your other examples. VLC, KDE, and LibreOffice are all more intuitive than the GIMP.