1) Blender is GPLv2'ed Software,so there is no immediate danger of MS creating proprietary fork of Blender and making money by selling the fork. I beleive that they are contributing to Blender which benefits community as a whole.
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.
Krita is fine for painting but isn't a full replacement for Photoshop. Inkscape does vectors, which is something else different entirely.
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.
Although I agree, one key difference from this case and your analogy between Vim and Notepad++ is you don't save a few hundred/thousand dollars switching from Vim to Notepad++.
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.
Not only the money is the issue, also your livelihood if you live in a country where the US can decide from one day to the next to sanction it for what ever reason, and cutting your access to any cloud service.
They should have an 'industry standard' keymap option on first start like Blender. But it's not nearly as weird as Blender was: there's no right click select, and eg. the cloning tool is basically the same thing as Photoshop's, though the large variety of select tools is a bit intimidating.
GIMP is ...not very good. Fixing the UI and UX wouldn't change that. Compared to GIMP, as a project, Krita is in another dimension.
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.
Yeah, they seem to be off to a fairly slow start. This isn't the first Gimp fork to try to work on UX - but biting off a huge old codebase isn't easy and previous efforts have all been overwhelmed or overtaken by upstream and fizzled out, afaik.
i'm not convinced the issue is GIMP not matching Photoshop so much as it having awkward UX that's hard to adapt to. Also, Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 (!)
A big workflow in modern Photoshop is stuff like Layer Styles (non-destructive image editing). GIMP has no equivalent to that (most of its filters are still destructive, despite the 10+ year project to switch to GEGL).
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.
gIMP isn't remotely at the same power as Photoshop. Photoshop's non destructive editing layers, layer effects, smart layers, and 100s of other features are no where to be seen in gIMP. It's almost like comparing Notepad to VSCode or MS Word. gIMP's FAQ says they are trying to add that stuff to gIMP in gIMP 3.2 but it's been part of Photoshop since like 2003
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
> It's almost like comparing Notepad to VSCode or MS Word
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.
To be blunt, if that's your impression then you don't know how to use photoshop. If you did you'd understand the vast and extreme differences in capabilities.
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.
If that’s your impression you either can’t understand my comment or won’t / are trolling. I took a high school class taught by a professional graphic designer, using PS and Illustrator. I’m not claiming that’s my career now, but not everyone uses Photoshop as a fulltime job, and GIMP's good enough for plenty of use cases (eg. a one-person team indie game with art made entirely with it) (and can do stuff PS can't easily do with better scripting).
Simply put, a FLOSS alternative to professional software isn't an alternative if it's unable to be used professionally. The barrier for freelance and hobbyist work isn't people's concerns with dethroning these proprietary applications.
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.
This seems mostly true, but on “a FLOSS alternative to professional software isn't an alternative if it's unable to be used professionally”: Photoshop is not exclusively professional software. Last I knew, it costed $10 a month. That's a serious barrier to entry to exceptionally poor residents of slums within developing countries, like the disabled boy who lifted himself out of poverty with GIMP and other FLOSS (https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-software-gimp.html#content), but it's basically pocket change to privileged people in the first world like plenty of YouTubers I've seen use PS as part of hobbies like tiny indie gamedev. This seems like an OK niche for GIMP to target while Krita gets more professional. It's tempting to want them to unite and make one raster editor to rule them all, but it doesn't seem necessary. GIMP doesn't seem to need dedicated full time devs and effort comparable to 3D software, which is more inherently complex and in proprietary form is licensed for orders of magnitude more money than PS.
inkscape and krita are good but gimp can burn in hell. even extremely simple operations like making a section and then moving only that part of the selection on the current layer somewhere else requires triple key combinations you have to google. the interface seems like it's designed to be as frustrating and unintuitive to use as possible
“Should the width of a shape be defined by the inside, outside, or center of its border” is (box-model in HTML terms) is a thing I use all the time in illustrator, but is missing in SVG :(
Photopea.com seems to have matched photoshop UI and runs in the browser. It's not open source but from what I understand it's an one man project which means it's possible for a small dev team to create t an open source photoshop alternative from scratch.
It's plain to see how Blender benefits the big companies that are supporting it. So how would a FLOSS alternative to Adobe CS benefit anyone except end users who can't/don't want to pay?
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.