“The art and design communities, in particular, are feeling the pinch from Adobe Suite going towards a rental model, and now the artist and perennial thorn in the side of anyone who seeks to own a colour, [Stuart Semple] is doing something about it. He’s launching a competing suite called provocatively, Abode, which will follow an affordable paid-for licence model.”
The Abode project seems overly optimistic in terms of scope, cost and timing to me but then I’ve never been involved in software development. Still, alternatives to the big names are always nice.
There’s a learning curve, granted. The photographers I know who use Gimp prefer it. YMMV. <shrug>
I don’t doubt that those that choose to use it prefer it. What I see time and again is someone will try it, find it missing features they want/need and revert back. I encourage the use of GIMP and other FOSS where I can. It’s just not a one to one drop in.
Agreed that it’s not a drop-in replacement. I get that professionals don’t often have time to learn new software and prefer to stick with what they know. But if they have the time and motivation, they can save some money as well as supporting FOSS.
As far as photography goes, I’ve never needed anything like Photoshop or Gimp, I do fine with just Darktable and DigiKam (YMMV).
My personal preference is Seashore for Mac, but I haven’t used macOS in a few years (not entirely by choice but because my uni is largely Windows based and it became too much to keep up with how to integrate into the ecosystem).