What's wrong with Krita, GIMP, Inkscape, etc.?
If GIMP prioritized matching Photoshop's UX to make it easy to switch over (shortcuts, UI similarity, etc.), it'd be much more successful at converting Photoshop users. Serious Photoshop users at this point have spent more than a decade (!) committing these things to muscle memory.
GIMP hasn't made replicating Photoshop's UX a priority, so it isn't a replacement for someone more comfortable using the industry standard tool.
If I used Vim for a decade, then you said, "Notepad++ also edits text, why don't you switch over?" Well, I'm not as productive in Notepad++, and I don't think I'll ever be. Same for GIMP.
That's an extra factor that, at least for me, made it worth switching and investing some hours into adjusting for hotkeys/shortcuts/etc. To be fair to your point though, I don't have a decade of full-time work invested into Photoshop so perhaps my muscle memory was more malleable.
If any software is going to become a successful FLOSS Photoshop replacement it's either Krita (if they decide to go that route instead of just painting) in a few years, a new open source project with an impressive MVP (like Olive the video editor, to Adobe Premiere), or some kind of miracle like one of their commercial competitors deciding to open source it.
I just want to understand what they delivered since June, 2019. Could you name a couple of examples?
There's plenty of other weird awkward UI and mental model decisions (e.g. GIMP makes the user select the width and height of each layer up-front, when Photoshop just assumes an infinite canvas and computes an AABB for each layer, leading).
A good portion of the work I do in Photoshop is vector editing (e.g. any real composition has dozens of shapes and even purely pixel work is going to use a lot of vector masks), GIMP lacks any vector tools and the team has been opposed to adding it, because it thinks Inkscape is better suited to vector art. Which, I mean sure, but it misses the point! Vector masks are incredibly valuable for compositing work, and we shouldn't have to switch between two radically different apps to have a usable workflow.
https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-suppor...
I don't know what other analogy to make but it's a hugely powerful feature and arguably essential feature which basically puts Photoshop in a separate category from gIMP, at least until they add it to gIMP
That's pretty hyperbolic. It's not like GIMP doesn't have basic layers, blend modes, etc. And Krita seems to have better non-destructive editing than GIMP.
I don't think GIMP is going to blow Photoshop out of the water anytime soon, or is even too close to as competitive in its area as Blender is in 3D, but I've used Photoshop and Illustrator for maybe 50 hours and Photoshop wasn't drastically better than GIMP for basic stuff, composing a simple photoreal scene from individual photos, simple graphic design, etc.
I don't have a good easy analogy to make but the two pieces of software, Photoshop and gIMP are not remotely in the same league.
Can you get hired at a large studio with Blender on your resume? Absolutely. And Krita is slowly heading down a similar path.
GIMP, on the other hand, is dead-set on being relegated to a corner for FLOSS purists. It still doesn't have a complete CMYK workflow. It can't compete with Photoshop, and its authors have stated they don't want to compete. And until something comes along that can, people will continue to learn and use the proprietary option first and foremost.
1) Megacorps creating and popularizing means greater adoption. Greater adoption is good thing.
2) FLOSS Graphic Design SUITE is good. Ideally, it can be made to run on every platform.
2) Offtopic but i wish megacorps collaborate to create FLOSS alternative to Adobe Suit like Photoshop/Other Graphic Design programs. This would super benefit everybody on all platforms.