I worked in prepress, so pretty good an Photoshop, and vastly prefer GIMP. The problems with GIMP are technical, there are some necessary things for some jobs that it simply hasn't been able to do, but I'm seeing a lot of work being done on them.
The problem with GIMP in industry is 1) that .psd is a standard, and 2) that Photoshop has a bad UI that takes a lot of work to understand well enough to do the very fine work most people are doing with it. Nobody would want to start over even if the consensus was that GIMP was better than Photoshop; Photoshop would still be good enough.
Hopefully Adobe will be user-hostile enough to lose a bunch of people to Affinity, and a bunch of people on Affinity will weaken Adobe standards in industry generally. GIMP could sneak in on the back of that.
GIMP is Free Software, it only gains features, never loses them. In the long term, there's no way anyone else can compete.
Gimp 3.0 is still in release candidate and nobody is forced to move to gimp 3.0 until their favorite plugins are ready.
Additionally it is trivial to have both installed on the same machine and there haven't been breaking changes in the xcf format as far as I know so you can open the same file on both version without issues.
seconded. i used a lot of photoshop CS2 and CS3, as well as gimp from the same time period. for the most part i felt they were on-par with each other at the time.
but i'm not sure how well that mimics photoshop in day to day stuff. hopefully they make strides in usability because it wasn't there the last time i tried it.
