GIMP is a steaming pile of shit. It's not 400k away from being a Photoshop competitor. Maybe it is less so now, but when I last used it, I said never again. If you need Photoshop to actually get work done, the $120 it costs ($120 gets you both Photoshop and Lightroom) is well worth your money. Many people charge more for one hour of contract work than Photoshop costs to buy for an entire year.

But there are very good Photoshop competitors that don't cost a lot of money. Pixelmator is $29 and a better program for many users. It's lightning fast to open and use and it requires less computing resources.

I remain deeply unconvinced that any software that requires an elite UI and interaction model will ever come out of a software libre solution. In addition, most software libre solutions are simply copies off of someone's else's ideas and hard work. It can't exist without paid software to copy first.

What are we even doing in tech and software if we are arguing that people should copy other people's work and then make it free, causing people to lose their jobs?