Reply #26: If you are a pro, you WILL use Photoshop at some point, but let's be honest.

[Occulus]

For the vast majority of image processing tasks that ordinary people perform, GIMP can do much more than everything required without the $700 price tag. You will have more features in Photoshop, but you better get more; that's one hell of a lot of money!

Disclaimer: I am a Blender user but would dearly love to buy a copy of Lightwave (same price tag as Photoshop) just because Lightwave was used for the visual effects in Galactica and those visuals were damn pretty. I'm sure I could get very nearly the same quality from Blender, but I'm also sure it would be more work.

Further, GIMP is the only answer for an educational setting in which a site license for Photoshop is not possible. If schools want to save money (and they do) they should choose GIMP over Photoshop in every case.

I'm certain that, with enough development support, GIMP could easily be a viable choice for professionals. The only difference there is the amount of money available to pay developers, which Adobe has a lot of. But then, the FOSS community is a passionate bunch that usually wants their version to be on par with professional packages (see Blender for more on that), so the only difference is really a function of time. Today's GIMP beats yesterday's Photoshop hands-down; today's Blender beats yesterday's 3d Studio Max hands-down.

If you absolutely must have all of Photoshop's features, by all means, spend the seven hundred bucks on it. If you do, you're probably a professional in the first place, and as I said, in that case you should be using Photoshop. But for the rest of us, GIMP is an eminently acceptable option, which makes your statement that "there is no Photoshop for linux" just plain false.