There are better free alternatives too.

[1] https://krita.org/en/

and

[2] https://www.photopea.com/

to name but two.

The Gimp is dire software and needs taking out and shooting. It's one of those awful apps that people who know nothing about digital design always trot out whenever others bemoan the lack of Photoshop on Linux. A recommendation that does more harm than good, as anyone who's used Photoshop and gives The Gimp a spin will end up thinking "If that's the best Linux has to offer, Linux must be rubbish!"

Krita doesn't have feature parity with GIMP.

Given how difficult and unintuitive it is to use, I don't think Gimp has feature parity with itself.

I love Krita, but I use it for different things than I use GIMP for.

It's really not bad at all. I've yet to run into a task I couldn't complete with GIMP.

Affinity Photo. It's basically the same thing but a one-off payment of £50.

I've been looking for this comment.

Ever since they started offering the Windows version as well I've been using Affinity Photon exclusively. I'm not doing a whole lot of photo editing, but when I do, I don't want to bother with the awful user experience that GIMP provides. I'll gladly pay 50€ for a software like Affinity Photo that offers almost the same features as PS while also being able to work with a lot of Photoshop file formats

What else is interesting is that if you are willing to migrate to a tablet based workflow then you can get tools very, very close to par with the Adobe suite for less than $100 - and that's a one time buy, not a subscription. If you're not married to open source, of course.

Spend another hundred or so on an Apple pencil and some font licenses and you are flying.

yeah well that is basically my point. We can all keep paying Adobe or someone else or make sure GIMP has at least one person working on it full time and have legitimate chance of not needing Photoshop in the future.

My point was something else: happy to pay someone for commercial alternative to Photoshop, coz I'm never gonna pay one more dime to Adobe.

Same here. I've been using PS since version 4.0 and it has become an absolutely bloated nightmare. +the cloud, vendor lock-in, pricing and all that stuff.

>We can all keep paying Adobe or someone else or make sure GIMP has at least one person working on it full time and have legitimate chance of not needing Photoshop in the future.

FOSS is a free market. The mere fact that GIMP isn't meeting users' needs is supposed to result in competing, superior forks driving it out of business, not a desire to give more money to the incumbent.