[gizmo]

Gimp and Paint.net have probably benefited from a million hours of open source labor and yet their capabilities are nowhere near Adobe's products.

People underestimate how much work commercial software takes by many orders of magnitude. This kickstarter is maybe performance art but if they're serious there is no chance in hell they will actually produce software that is actually competitive with an Adobe suite product.

[herbst]

No idea about Paint.Net but there is not a single thing i could name that I am missing with Gimp.

The only downside of Inkscape is that it doesn't properly open and save the most recent Adobe formats other than that I also have no idea why I would need anything more than what Inkscape offers.

Sure the Adobe tools have a lot to explore, a lot of buttons and options hidden in millions of submenus.

But a good portion of computer users have only a limited need for tools like this, no interest in that constant learning curve after major updates and no use for all those advanced features.

Imagine I learned using these tools 20 years ago, and while they heavily improved they still work exactly the same. Every time I meet Photoshop it 180d their design and button placements...

My point is you do not need to feature match Adobe to compete, making it more accessible alone could be a selling point.

[wiseowise]

> No idea about Paint.Net but there is not a single thing i could name that I am missing with Gimp.

> The only downside of Inkscape is that it doesn't properly open and save the most recent Adobe formats other than that I also have no idea why I would need anything more than what Inkscape offers.

Good for you. I can assure you that you'll find thousands of creative workers that will find what's missing from those tools.

> My point is you do not need to feature match Adobe to compete, making it more accessible alone could be a selling point.

That's why GIMP and Inkscape are industry standards that displaced Adobe tools.

[herbst]

> That's why GIMP and Inkscape are industry standards that displaced Adobe tools.

Depends where you go. If you go to a CCC event or a Linux shop I am sure they are.

[throwaway2990]

And yet gimp does not have the productivity to be used in a creative agency. So while you find gimp useful. It’s useless to pretty much every agency in existence.

[mejutoco]

As a counterexample, I would say Blender is even more complicated and is doing very well with the same model. Of course, it started as commercial software but still.

[cmiles74]

Perhaps this project will spend it's funding on a fork of Gimp that is more similar to the Photoshop UI and closes some of the gap in features.