no MDI interface for The GIMP...

[user222]

Why doesn't The GIMP have an MDI interface, so that you won't need to have many GIMP windows on the desktop?

[variant]

quite honestly its because the developers are not interested in doing it - regardless of the massive user pressure to implement it and the obviousness that its the best way to do it (multiple seperate windows is a real hinderence to functionality and also a pita). They are known by many to be quite arrogant (not all of them to be sure but two or three are very agressive to newcomers and sugestions).
Development is excessivly slow (check the time difference between major version numbers) so any change in policy would take years to implement, they would probably excuse the slow cycle with "but we focus on stability" however gimp is not really all that stable.

They may say that it is "impossible" with current versions of gtk however that is clearly not the case, it would just require some major reworking of the code.

The have killed off a huge ammount of interest in The Gimp with this attitude.

Hopefully there will be a fork with enough developers who listen to user comments to make a real go of it but im not holding my breath!