Why? I don't understand this. You're not "saving" what you see on the monitor by storing the information to a .png file; the moment you "save" you'll lose some information decided by an algorithm you do not understand, so it really is not "saving" anything, it's "exporting" what you see on the monitor to a different format. When you actually click the "save" button in gimp it stores the content in a format it can recover 100% of the information you'll need tomorrow. These sort of terminological differences between Photoshop, Paint.NET, Gimp, Krita etc... do not point a deficiency in Gimp, rather just a cultural difference decided by rational arguments. I think people should be more thoughtful about what are the targets of Gimp Project, Gimp does not want to be a Photoshop clone, they're trying to make a great image manipulation program; and as software engineers they make their own decisions how to structure/name their program.
When x is standard workflow for many of the other such programs (and things like word processors) and it isn't such in Gimp, that very thing drives people away. Most artists aren't going to care what the software engineers want in the program: Instead, they are going to care about things like this. When added up, it just makes for a frustrating experience. It doesn't really matter what the technicalities are if you are the artist.
Yes, you do lose some information depending on the format. Heck, I notice loss simply looking at an image on different screens. The fact is, though, that folks actually need to save in different formats. Sure, I keep my layers and information in tact while working, but folks also need to be able to share their work, print it, and things like that. For that sort of thing, you need the different formats. The exact format depends on what one is doing: PNG works for facebook and instagram. Some sites have file size limits, and with some printing you have a bit more leeway.
I'm not even a photoshop fan myself: I chose my software based on both if it was easily integrated with a Wacom pen display and how well it mimicked traditional artwork flow and styles. Hence my use of Corel. Photoshop is basically a renting program now, and I generally welcome alternatives. Gimp has always been somewhat frustrating because of little stuff like this.
As a user, I think about "saving" as a process to persist my work. If there might be technical fine-grained issues, show me a warning sign in the save dialog, but don't come up with a process that "makes me think".
PNG is just a compressed pixel-to-colorspace format. It does not and cannot contain most of the information in your work. When you save a .png you're basically doing something similar to compiling C to machine language. You permanently lost all the high level information, possibly in a way you cannot track back (in the case of .JPG). This is not saving, your work will not persist, the format you're "saving" is specifically engineered in a way it doesn't persist any more information than it needs. I hope we agree thus far. As I said above, it's merely a terminological difference, in gimp this process is called "exporting" and I can't understand why this is such a big deal. You literally wouldn't be able to navigate Gimp or Photoshop or Blender etc without having basic knowledge about the program (i.e. looking at the manual) like where menus are etc, and this is just one instance.
> If there might be technical fine-grained issues, show me a warning sign in the save dialog, but don't come up with a process that "makes me think".
Is this a joke? You literally have to just click the very next button under "Save" which reads "Export As". What "makes you think"?
My favorite was probably PaintShop Pro before 10, and second is probably Paint.Net (if it had a few more features). A simple, easy to use interface with the majority of features really accessible. Gimp offers so much more, though frankly, it's about 10x as hard to use. I only do so when I want to do something that's difficult in Paint.Net or Krita.
I want to like it, I want to use it... that said, If you had a few users who like other software use it, nobody I know would choose Gimp over other tools as a preference. I don't always like changes that are made to an application I've used for a while, and can understand resistance from Gimp developers and users. It doesn't matter, sometimes convention should win, sometimes making things easier means change, and sometimes making things consistent means an inferior technical choice.
I can do this with paint.net.
I do this all the time with Corel Painter. Any work in progress gets saved in a way that opens with the layers (corel's format). When I'm done, I can simply collapse the layers and save in a number of formats. No big deal. I understand that some formats simply don't allow the layers. That shouldn't be an issue, though. All it takes is a popup telling the user about this.