The GIMP will never magically become software beloved by artists—not without radically changing its culture, and making the artists the ones who call the shots. The GIMP will remain what it has always set out to be: a tinkerer’s toolbox, more concerned with the purity of its software politics than with garnering a loyal userbase of photographers and designers.
But because everyone insisted to poise it as a viable Photoshop killer, Linux is left with an obvious hole in its software offering, a hole nobody managed to fill with their own challenger.
↫ Aria Salvatrice
Excellent article, and spot-on conclusion.
What a bunch of whining. First of all you can always fork GIMP and listen to the artists in your own fork if you feel that is the issue. Good luck. And second of all Photoshop and other solutions have roughly 40 million paying subscribers on where GIMP has a thousand people willing to donate something. So in the end i don’t know what some of you expect. Start donating more to GIMP and then you can expect more. For the level of support it receives it’s fantastic piece of software.
This will always be a prime example where proprietary software is just better for the task at hand. Photo editing is just fundamentally better suited by paid programmers and a single boss calling the shots.