I don't think its because of being different to photoshop. I tried Gimp many times during the last maybe 15 years. The UI used to be so chaotic I could not find my way around. If I tried very hard, I was basically able to do everything I needed, but with so much effort. Years ago the UI was just bunch of floating toolbars on the desktop without the possibility (or at least I couldn't find a way at that time) to have a common backdrop. All the little settings and modals were just so hard to use it was very frustrating. I had the very same experience with Inkscape over the years. I want to like those project so much, I know a lot of effort is going into that, but it didn't work for me. Same experience was with blender before the big redesign. Now blender is simply awesome and pleasant to use. I hope for such transformation for Gimp and Inkscape. (and Audacity)

> I think the GIMP hate is almost entirely down to the difference in its UI from Photoshop.

I disagree. I use Affinity Photo 2, which also has a different interface, and it's so much easier to use than GIMP despite having more features.

Yeah and also Krita exists in the open source world and is very nice to use. People are just in denial about GIMP.

in earlier years, but in a way to this day, a significant factor against GIMP was not the UI - people could get used to the UI and did even when grumbling about it.

A big problem for a chunk of possible users was that GIMP's colour support sucked (and I believe it's still not really fixed). The moment you wanted to work outside RGBA at 8bits per channel, and maybe a bit playing with indexed color, you were in for a lesson in pain. And a lot of people wanted a tool they could earn money with, and that meant for a long time at least some amount of print work. And print, even digital printing, means CMYK. Later on photography started demanding HDR features. Even web these days will deal with non-RGB color spaces, and I am not talking about HDR.

Meanwhile GIMP's engine for years even if in UI you technically could select colours in CMYK, they were internally converted to RGB for calculations, then converted again. CinePaint, aka FilmGimp, started because people could not get patches for 48bit RGBA into mainline. And so on, and so on. Meanwhile Photoshop and other competitors would not only have a less divisive UI, but also additional features (I knew people who would choose Photoshop just for included pantone colour database).

This reads as "because I can do my job with it, it should be good enough for anyone". Making band posters is not really the same as being a professional creative using it all day long. It has not been adopted among those people, while Blender has. The reason is almost certainly because its UI sucks, not because it's "different".

Lack of features more likely IMO.

I never said that GIMP is better or more useful than blender or krita or photoshop, only that I am better with it, that it can do all of the photo and image editing I need, and that I think the UI is most of the problem for the people who dislike it.

I'm not punching at all.