Linux

GIMP has its share of issues, just like any other software. but it's biggest issue is that somewhere down the line general users got this idea in their head that it was supposed to be a Photoshop clone.

So they go into it with certain expectations and then get frustrated when it doesn't work that way. People like me, who actually learned GIMP before PS, obviously didn't go in with the same bias and therefore have a much better grasp on it.

Gimp is not a Photoshop clone. it's its own piece of kit with it's own design and feature decisions that some may like and others may not. That's life. The developers have no obligation to follow any other software design scheme any more than Sony is obligated to follow LGs TV UI. They're not clones, they're alternatives.

if you think Gimps only function is to copy Photoshop, you're in for a bad time. If you want to use gimp as an ALTERNATIVE and go in without the bias,, you'll likely learn your way around a LOT faster.

I'm not excusing Gimps failings. far from it. but I AM saying that half the issue is the Photoshop users thinking that gimp only exists to copy everything from their precious Adobe daddy. And that's simply not true.

GIMP is beyond stale and it's frustrating to see people recommend it as an "alternative" to Photoshop when it's about as actively developed as X11. The fact it's making rounds on FOSS news channels/sites because they ported the UI to GTK 3 (Which was replaced by GTK4 3 years ago now) is really a sign of how bad the project has gotten.

Photopea is a near feature-for-feature clone of Photoshop, designed around the superior UX and UI of photoshop, and all within a webapp that leverages hardware acceleration. All done by a single person. The downside is that it's a proprietary webapp that costs money to use without ads clogging half the screen.

And you know what? I STILL prefer Photopea to GIMP, after using the latter for years. GIMP is old, slow, and pretty much dead in the water and I'm certain that they'd have produced 3.0 faster if someone had rewritten it over a weekend instead of trying to port the godawful mess of tech debt that must be going on inside the GIMP project atm.-

Photoshop getting better support via WINE/Proton is more likely than GIMP ever returning to its hay-day of being a true competitor to PS.

Darktable if you want to do professional photography editing, and GIMP if you want to modify graphics, pixelart, design flyers or handouts, posters, or whatever else you want to do in a raster editor.

I have been using GIMP since fifth grade in school when we had an intro to photo manipulation, and since whenever I needed something edited, composited or designed. It blows my mind again and again that people online apparently find GIMP hard to use or unintuitive. It's one of the most normal programs I have ever used. Photoshop on the other hand feels utterly inconceivable to me.

I had the same experience moving from GIMP to Photoshop. 😂

GIMP has the closest thing to feature parity. If you're looking for similarity of UI and workflow, you're not going to get it. Adobe throws millions of dollars that open-source projects don't have at streamlining their UI. UI specialists that will work for free are unicorns, so most open-source UIs are designed by volunteer generalist programmers. Which means that said UI gets the job done, but isn't optimized for the workflow of people who don't think like the original programmers.

Personally, I might shift the same picture through Darktable, GIMP, Inkscape, and even Scribus, depending on what I was trying to do with it. (Text on a path -> probably Inkscape, then export as PNG and import into GIMP as a layer.) Is that less convenient than performing all the operations in one program? Possibly, but since I don't like Photoshop's UI either, I'm willing to give up on "one-stop shopping".

(So who, for my money, had the best UI? Probably Paint Shop Pro, twenty or so years ago when it still belonged to JASC. Of course, it was a simpler program too, and so had less junk in its interface.)

Fact is, if you're a pro, you've invested years into learning Photoshop's interface and how to get the best results out of it. You're in the position of a baseball player who's decided to start all over again with basketball. Any attempt to transition to other software is going to be really, really frustrating for you, and likely drop your productivity into the toilet for a few months at least. Plus, you're going to need some features that average users don't care about, especially if you're preparing work for print.

I hate to say it, but you may honestly be best off running Photoshop in a VM rather than trying to move to other software, at least until you can set aside a couple of months where you have no urgent projects (if that ever happens).

photopea.com is actually pretty great, much easier to use than gimp with similar (or even better) feature set.

if learning gimp is such a roadblock then i doubt anything will seem good to you. it really sounds like you're looking for a clone of photoshop, rather than an alternative to photoshop, and i don't think such a thing exists. any reasonably complicated software will have a learning curve to it, so you may need to pick between continuing to use windows and photoshop, or putting more time than you'd rather into learning something new.

as to why there aren't any clones of photoshop, i expect it is because it would be a lot of work, and they'd constantly be scrambling one step behind to implement whatever updates photoshop gets, so no matter how much effort was put into such a project, it'd still get viewed as a second rate copy of photoshop. if you want to make a graphics program, might as well focus on making it good and making it your own, rather than chasing adobe's coat-tails, y'know?

If not, why?

How many man-hours of work were already spent in the development of Photoshop, its plugins, etc? How much has that cost? On what scale of time was that spread around? How much money have designers put into them by buying licenses (now subscriptions) of Adobe's suite?

If you want an alternative for Linux that can match Photoshop, you need to be willing to support the R&D costs that have been paid off by Adobe throughout the decades of its development. Are you willing to do it?