GIMP 2.9.4 and our vision for the future

GIMP is an icon of open-source software, but do any professional designers use it full-time over Photoshop?

Compare with Sketch, which has taken scores of users from Illustrator.

Yes.

But as for 42, this is unlikely the answer you wanted to hear.

The one feature that breaks it for me for professional work is that filters happen to a layer instead of being attached to them an are able to be changed on a whim. It's impossible to do any real work if you have to render and re-render every shadow on every text and object when its size changes. I think I could do without everything else but that.

I get aoloe's reaction though. Whenever someone posts something cool about Gimp, invariably a bunch of “yeah it's free, but it's not Adobe Photoshop is it?” comments pop up.

Why should we care? Why not judge it on its own merits?

This reminds me of how a lot of people used to respond to the notion of using GNU/Linux distributions as free operating systems suitable for day-to-day desktop use. Sure, I get why not everyone might want to use it (nobody is asking you to), but why does every bit of positive news or cool achievement have to get accompanied by dozens of comments by authors directly comparing it to a commercially available alternative, stating that they'd use it if only it did this and if only it looked more like that?

I love how we as a global community have such a wealth of software tools available; to use for free (legally!), with a philosophy that explicitly encourages sharing and enables anyone with the know-how to contribute. Some of these tools have been with us for decades, such as Gimp, and each release brings new features and improvements. Instead of celebrating its strengths, software like Gimp gets scrutinized by holding it to an arbitrary standard it can never meet (the full feature set of Adobe Photoshop), simply because the goal posts are forever moving.

I do not intend to berate anyone genuinely asking about how to migrate to free tools like Blender, Gimp, and Inkscape — questions where the comparison of features is warranted — but a lot of comments appear to dismiss tools like Gimp out of hand simply because they aren't carbon copies of the most popular proprietary alternatives.

With operating systems we've entered the next phase, where using a free software operating system isn't cause for raised eyebrows, and where people are actually asking the reverse question: why can't Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X do this thing I can do easily on GNU/Linux? Hopefully we can reach that level of acceptance with other free software as well.

Is this mandatory nowadays? I mean it's nice that PS (and even Pixelmator and Affinity) have that, but I did design work many years ago and managed fine.

Sure it will be more inconvenient, but it's doable.