Photoshop piracy was the worst thing that ever happened to the GIMP.
What GIMP probably needs is an overhaul that copies what Photoshop does. People understand Photoshop, and it's the industry standard.
From what I can tell the UI's look fairly similar too: https://gtchan1.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/5-gui-photoshop.... http://www.gimpchat.com/files/196_2012-05-12_214936.jpg There's various widgets that contain e.g. tools, layers, history, fonts, tool options; and of course each tool might have its own options.
(Also, the team itself have said in various ways that they'll never have as their goal to be a "Photoshop clone", as I understand it that's an unreachable and thus depressing goal. It's a lot more motivating to simply try to make something that works well than trying to cater to every whim of those who don't want to pay for Photoshop.)
They may look superficially similar, and at a high level have the same tools, but from a fundamental workflow point of view there are too many things that are just very different (non-destructive editing, smart objects etc).
the team itself have said in various ways that they'll never have as their goal to be a "Photoshop clone"
And that would be fine and if they'd done something unique or innovative with the UI and really made it their own. Unfortunately they didn't and they're stuck looking kind of like a half-baked Photoshop clone. And as long as that is kind of what they look like, then that is how they'll be judged.
So does the GIMP look like Photoshop, or does it not?
It's foreign to photoshop users, GIMP is just different. I really don't like those open source software that want to copy some proprietary one. They tend to copy the mistakes of the other software too. Maybe GIMP doesn't have all the features that photoshop has but copying photoshop is not the way to go.
Still not sure why Adobe hasn't gone after the Linux market. They could completely dominate.
Of course, we're offering zero evidence that either position is true, just bald assed assertions. That I vastly prefer multi-window is my only evidence.
>People understand Photoshop, and it's the industry standard.
They've been trained to. It's as intuitive to you as the way home from work. It's as intuitive to me as the way to your house from your job.
That's ironic, given that the latest Gimp (2.8) defaults to a single-window interface. I'm having a hard time adjusting, but this doesn't mean it was a bad idea.
Inkscape on the other hand really is a viable alternative to Illustrator.
Of course I do, and those people will be faced with an uncomfortable choice, suffer the 'free' tool or pay for access to the 'non free' tool. And the people who run the 'non free' tool will use that money to pay engineers to improve it. And the engineers working on the 'free' tool will do so without remuneration or reward other than knowing they built something they like.
Sure, the Steve Wozniaks of the world have always had the ability to write their own GIMP plugins or whatever, and you're right: that hasn't changed.
But there were a few decades there where the rest of the world could actually own commercial software, and that had a lot of upsides. Those days are drawing to a close.
(Yes, I know that EULAs attempted to "license" software to you instead of truly letting you own the software. But for all practical purposes, you did at least own it to the extent that it would continue to work even if the software vendor's servers went down, or they decided they didn't like you using their software, or your government decided they didn't like you using the software vendor's software, or whatever.)