How relevant is print these days ? Coming from that background it's depressing to see my former coworkers working in a shrinking market, and the only people in graphics I know that are making reasonable money are in digital.
Not to say that it's irrelevant just that at this point it feels like it kind of missed the boat in this space.
Still quite relevant, especially in some areas. Think about packaging and labeling, there's just not really a way around print in these areas.
Besides that, digital print is the future. Print also needs to become clever and data-driven, more personalized and tailored to the recipient, but that's hard work.
Example: Just last week I received a catalogue with the fall/winter collection of a larger clothing brand. I threw it away immediately. Lots of things in it that are not my size, or my style or whatnot. A personalized product would have helped. Pick articles similar to those I own (you got this data from my previous orders), only show articles that are available in XXL or larger (look at the sizes I kept and did not return) and that's it. "Hey Martin, these are _your_ pieces for the winter season, enjoy!" Maybe it's only 16 pages then instead of 50+ but it would have been a much better experience for me. Also cheaper to print and ship for the store but with a much higher value. But yeah, programmatic printing is hard(er) to do then order 100k catalogues from the cheapest shop you'll find.
The reason they didn't use GIMP is because they couldn't use GIMP. It simply didn't have necessary capability. When I was working in prepress, I would have done anything to use GIMP. That desperation to escape Photoshop is why Affinity took off.
If Inkscape could get a UI for precision positioning, something you could e.g. design an entry form in; and Scribus could polish up, I think a lot of people would move to a FOSS workflow.
I guess - of course it's a chicken-egg sort of a problem. No one's going to use it for print, before it has print-related capabilities - the same can be said for much of the UX, in general.
I think that was a typo in the article - GIMP is now "anyRGB". The color profile is associated with the RGB values, so you can load, work in, and export AdobeRGB, AppleRGB, etc.
We also load palettes (ASE, ACO, etc) in CMYK, CIE Lab, etc. It's true we don't have a dedicated CMYK/LAB mode yet, but 3.0's color management work laid the foundation to implement this much easier in a future release.
Professionals have no problem purchasing their work tools, and no reason to use subpar tools.
Edit: To the FOSS hackers who are down voting. You can buy state of the art professional image editing and design software for less than a hundred dollars. Deliver work to one client and you've paid for all your tools. Why would a professional waste their time with GIMP, when they can use all those hours working for clients with good tools and get paid?
It’s not the price, or even the fact that one has to pay. There are huge practical, security, and privacy reasons to never put closed-source software on your computer.
Sorry, not gonna buy into the paranoia that exists within every cult, including the FOSS cult. If your graphic design work has to be extremely secretive, then you'll do it on a machine without an internet connection. Do you think secretive companies like Apple or car manufacturers use GIMP for their graphical work? Of course not.
We're speaking about professionals now. If they need to, they will use devices without any personal data for their work.
And it's not like your average graphical designer can go through the trillions of lines of code in an open source environment to determine how secure it is. They're busy doing their job.
Given enough resources, floss tools are often best in class. With your short-sighted attitude, Linux, Firefox, Blender, etc wouldn’t exist and we’d all be a lot poorer for it—fully controlled by the Oracles of the world without option.
FOSS tools are usually worst in class for the actual user, with some exceptions. The exceptions are generally dev tools and sys admin tools. Linux is not best in class in anything unless you're a developer or a server admin.
The free market is a much more effective process for getting quality tools for the rest of us. There's nothing short sighted about it. As a professional I pay a fair price for my tools and the developers get a salary so they can continue to improve it. In the sector of image editing and graphic design, Affinity is a perfect example: cheap and top quality.
Open source software will not improve for any end user by more people using it. Only programmers can improve it, and only if they want to. Usually they don't want to, because the users are not paying them.
If those new users report new problems, I think it's helpful for everyone. As an example, I helped add support for importing Adobe's ASE palettes into GIMP. Now that we have this feature, I just got a bug report for improving it. The reporter had a palette with a color model that we didn't have when testing it, and that sample enabled us to fix the import problem.
As I said, a very short-sighted attitude. Four dimensional thinking is harder but not hard. Also, you don’t seem to get the beer/freedom distinction.
Mobile has been won, “Windows Server is dead” (read on this site many times), many desktop tools are floss now, even M$ is writing them. Your small industry not withstanding.
Not to say that it's irrelevant just that at this point it feels like it kind of missed the boat in this space.