> Gimp is like Linux's MS paint on steroids

Oh yeah, if steroids bring layers, masks, paths, a shitload of selection, transformation, and cropping tools, a whole lot of filters and loaders for all sorts of image file formats, complete color management support, 32-bit per channel processing and suchlike, then you might be correct :)

>complete color management support

GIMP still only half-supports CMYK in 2018, though. But as someone who uses it professionally, I agree that GIMP is a Linux's Photoshop, not a Linux's MS Paint. I'm guessing that the user you replied to has only used it as such and hasn't dive into all the tools and features it offers. With all the bugs and half-broken tools it has, I still think it is a great piece of software, and my life would be much harder without it.

> I agree that GIMP is a Linux's Photoshop, not a Linux's MS Paint

Photoshop had massive, productivity boosting features like Adjustment Layers, since the 4th release, in 1996!! simple non destructive effects were added to the list with 5.0 in 1998. That's 20 years ago. In 20 years, almost every single serious tool for image manipulation has understood that non destructive editing is at the core of productivity. Krita has it. Photoshop almost always had it. Lightroom has it. Affinity Photos has it. Pixelmator has it. The venerable shareware Paintshop Pro, one of the first popular Photoshop clone, grew that feature. Picasa, a free (as in beer, not as in freedom) photo library management and quick photo editing tool that was immensely popular on Windows before Google dropped it, had fast non destructive image editing.

Editing anything in GIMP feels like a painful process that allows no mistake and every single process, even just drawing a damn circle (one that doesn't have heavy artifacts by the way), takes more clicks or keyboard shortcut presses than it ever should. I know it's free software developed on some hobby developer's free time but that does not make it immune from criticism. Just because something is free doesn't make it good or worth considering. As a tool for producing content, the GIMP really is more linux's MS paint than photoshop. That's because Photoshop stopped being an overgrown paint-with-layers program since the 1996 release. I still remember how it felt to use the 5.0 release of Photoshop as if it was yesterday's. If I had no choice but to use 20 years old Photoshop vs 2018 GIMP, I'd pick the 20 years old software.

Half-broken tools? I know there are good reasons to dislike Cage Transform, but what other tools are half-broken?

I use "pinta" on Linux when I need an equivalent to MS paint.

Paint.net is pretty notable too. Windows only, but free, and halfway between paint and what Adobe offers. There are many plugins that either meet or exceed what you can find for Photoshop.

Both Pinta and Krita had really weird interactions with my touch screen the last time I tried. GIMP was the only one who worked correctly - I presume because it just treated it as a mouse (it may well be that my Linux configuration is to blame, not Pinta and Krita)

Perhaps things work better now.

Yeah, I think Pinta could be considered as MS Paint++ for Linux.

I use kolour paint. Don't really do much outside of resizing and cropping though.

Seconding. I'm pretty happy with KolourPaint, but all I use it for is resizing, cropping, and blocking out people's names and pictures in social media screenshots.

That's exactly the opposite of my experience. Krita is fine for the "crop images, make memes, etc" use case and for most artist-like things, but I found Gimp had slightly better tablet support (at least on Windows).

Krita has much better default pressure curves though. The default settings on the gimp are basically unusable with how nonlinear they are.

Yeah, this is something we've been looking into for a while.

See e.g. https://plus.google.com/+AmericoGobbo/posts/VK4oZv7Hobn and around.