I’m not sure why it would bother you that some people are satisfied with a piece of free software. That seems kinda weird to me tbh.

GIMP version 3.0, which was released on March 16th, introduced non-destructive editing. It supports non destructive editing with gradients through the use of layer effects and masks.

Not sure what you mean by ‘better selection tools’, but the ones they do have work just fine for how I use the program.

I am not a professional graphic designer, and I have never printed an image I made or tweaked with GIMP, so I’m not sure I would benefit from CMYK color space editing.

I’m sure you will say it is also shit, and I don’t have as much experience with it as I do GIMP but Inkscape is an open source vector graphics program that a lot of people seem to like, so it’s nice that we have that option for people whom it would be sufficient.

I’m not against people paying for programs they need to do their jobs, but I wish more people who believe in software freedom were willing to donate to Open Source projects that they use, or even ones that have the potential to be competitive, but aren’t quite there yet.

If professionals who rely on pro software, but also believe in software freedom would donate a fraction of what they spend on Pro software to projects like the GIMP, you would undoubtedly see a lot of the missing features show up in them.

As it stands most people either use the software and don’t donate, or pay $165 and up for software and then compare it to software that costs $0, as if that is any kind of a fair comparison.

My point was simply that most people aren’t professionals, and paying almost $700/year seems like overkill for people who want to occasionally create a meme or retouch a digital photo.

For people that absolutely have to have Pro software, clearly it’s not going to be competitive, but I sure am glad that it’s there for people who aren’t pros.

I’ve never used Affinity, but I used Photoshop plenty back in the day.

What features am I missing out on exactly?

I do realize that yes, that’s why I offered a couple of solutions to things that had nothing to do with that. Like thinking you had made a mistake or being afraid of messing up another OS on your machine.

I’m not trying to talk down to you, I’m trying to understand what your issue is, that’s why I’m asking questions.

So why was it that you needed to cancel the installation?

Ive never tried installing Mint, but it’s based on Ubuntu which have installed many times. Unless the installer is radically different it asks you a bunch of questions first, keyboard layout, timezone, whether or not it will be a dual boot or clean install etc. It typically doesn’t actually make any changes to the system until all that is set up and you select install.

The only exception to that I can think of is if you got to the point where you can configure your partitions in a dual boot scenario. If you made a mistake during that process, I can see it messing up your install if you then back out.

Other than that the only way I can think of that might bork you system is if you actually started installing the OS, and then attempted to cancel, at which point it makes perfect sense to me that would mess things up.

The only thing I really take issue with is acting as if cancelling an install of an OS halfway through the process is like such a common thing that enough people would run into the same issue that it would turn people off from installing Linux.

I think GIMP is great. It does everything most people need it to do. You just have to take time to learn how to use it, just like with everything else.

Why would you cancel the install half way through, is that something you normally do?

If you don’t have the time to install it properly, don’t start the process. If you do have the time see it through.

If you think you have made a mistake and can’t simply back up to the step you think you messed up, just continue. Most things can be fixed after install. Worst case scenario, you will just have to reinstall.

If you backed out because you were afraid of messing up your windows partition, I highly recommend backing up all your data before you install in the first place.

In what world is that normal?

The world where the vast majority of people don’t cancel installing an OS halfway through the process.

I can understand being frustrated, but you have to understand that your particular experience is not the norm. I’d be pretty confident saying that less than 1% of people will back out of an install half way through it or have that much of an issue installing (unless it’s Arch). So it’s not something that really needs to be fixed before people can start using Linux.

I didn’t even have that many problems setting up a dual boot with Windows in 2006 when I was a total newbie to Linux, and I had to figure out how partitioning and swap files worked.

Just ask for help in a respectful manner on your distros forum and someone will very likely be happy to assist you.

I didn’t realize that was how her name was spelled! That is fucking hilarious 😂