Why necro this thread to be so negative?
This is about to drop any day now, in a dev release.
I think some of your points are probably near the mark, but Iâm not quite clear what point youâre trying to make, or what response you hope to get.
Check out the thread below; adjustment layers, via GEGL is already being done. 
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I think he just want to vent frustration with regards on status of raster graphic content creation/editing in Linux. A year ago or so, that was almost the exact opinion I had. Now? In the near future, I might be end up ditching Krita for good considering their audience conservative stances on features, and for painting, I never had a intention to delve into the intrisics of their brush engine (which confuse some artists, but I was always fine with 6 basic boring brushes), and NDE is what I need for editing.
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Just chimed in to express my opinion why we donât see more and better AI powered tools in GIMP and I couldnât do it without some criticism. That hopefully will not be taken as offense.
If it is true that GIMP is getting adjustment layers, hopefully weâll see GIMP back on tack again with lots of motion and attention towards it. Pretty much the only major obstacle, and of course if some plugins will do a come back like resyntheziser etc.
We really need a good image editor especially on Linux, GIMP is a bit sleepy, Krita is wonderful and very active in development, but they focus on digital painting and animation exclusively, I once attempted to raise the photo editing topic and so many people seemed ready to burn me like a witch in medieval timesâŚ
It would be wonderful to see GIMP 3 released soon and with adjustment layers as this could boost interest in GIMP again for so many. But then, would the dev team be ready to listen to what creative community wants and meet those guidelines? After all theyâre developing GIMP as their spare time activity, unless that changed. Good source for inspiration is Blender, they do things really well and inspire entire industry and not only we see fast development and growth, but also there is high interest by third parties to develop plugins and extensions.
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I get that frustration.
Going on the krita-artists forum, users are now on the stance that if a feature is even remotely useful for anything other than painting, itâs a hard-no, and theyâd rather be looking for more painting-orientated features though that search is getting exhausted. They wanted to implement physical-based painting, and it is stalled because of the algorithm time complexity doesnât make it suitable for painting in the end. Iâd argue that the closing gaps part of filling tool is the end of the road for that goal given that physics-based painting is just ainât happening. Theyâre probably likely to move on to animation despite thatâs a smaller niche.
On the GIMP side on the other hand, history of development can be argued to be so slow to the point where even people with some bit of faith toward GIMP bailed and there were rises of alternative like Affinity suites. So, it can be understandable why people dislike GIMP.
The good news is that Krita isnât really missing that much to finally be a suitable alternative, and that missing thing is foreground selection tool. Thatâs something I want to continue the patch for, but without any solution to the noise bug between fully-selected and not selected areas, and I can no longer build Krita, that project has stalled and so my dream of Krita with built-in foreground selection tool is dead for now. And GIMP is getting NDE pretty soon. So, we could have multiple alternatives that fits similar roles in the end. And despite what people like to think, theyâre both suitable for editing and painting, and we have examples to show for that actually.
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People throw out the blender comparison way too easily. Ton from blender spent in excess of a decade advocating and improving blender with very little traction before it finally caught on. This was not a small amount of work and it didnât happen because âmagic.â
âJust follow the blender modelâ as if its just that easyâŚ
If you want to go feature for feature of gimp against applications that pay a lot of developers to write code, its probably going to lose. Krita was also losing before they found their digital painting nitche.
The question we should be asking is âdoes gimp have the features I need to accomplish what I want to do for my images?â For me that is a âyesâ and has been for a long time.
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I fully appreciate the comments all around, here.
First and foremost, GIMP is a fantastic piece of software; just like @paperdigits , it fullfills my needs completely â and, indeed, this is likely to be the single-most important factor for a great many users.
As is the case with absolutely anything else under the sun, though, of course it wouldnât hurt to add more features and functions; as is usually the case with almost everything else, however, acheiving such goals usually means facing various challenges and requires the necessary time and resources to invest â not to mention that, quite often, not all of our desires and wishes are even practical to start with (for many a varied reason).
Whenever I propose an idea, I try to keep the classic âwhat, why, when, where, who, and how?â in mind â i.e. what should be done, why we should do it, when it should be done (importance), who is available to do it, and â the hardest one of all! â how it can be all put together to acheive the desired outcome (i.e. a detailed, well investigated, well tested, practical solution). I very rarely have answers to all of them â which should be of no great surprise to anyone. 
This was / is me, except I donât dislike GIMP at all â On the contrary Iâm all for it. Itâs just that with my preferred workflow, it doesnât have what I need. Thatâs why Iâm on Affinity now for bitmap editing. Of course that does severely limit my potential for returning to Linux in the futureâŚ
I have to admit, a few years ago (in all fairness, I donât know about now since I donât participate in the GIMP community like I did before) there was â at least in my view â an underlying but noticable vibe from some corners of, âif you donât like GIMP then just go awayâ. That fit right in with the âno we wonât change the name and itâll be ready when itâs readyâ attitude.
Well, people did âgo awayâ, unfortunately. 
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You might think that following a classical marketing model of providing what the customer wants rather than what you want to do would mean that the more commercial photo editors would avoid the criticism of not listening but they donât seem to and professional photographers do say they are being ignored maybe the karma of years of not listening to people saying âhey I donât want my photo takenâ
Iâve been having a look at the silkypics manual they seem to use some open source libraries as affinity photo do
One of their selling points on the marketing theme is that the sequence of photo edits can cause image degradation and with their software the program chooses the sequence at a later stage. Maybe AI could do this for gimp in some way
I have heard people say that the non-destructive elements of affinity can make it troublesome I think the context was trying to make edits in a single color channel which looks quite straightforward in gimp in any color model
Maybe ok to state the obvious who cares how itâs done if itâs a good photo and I have seen some good ones on here recently
I am both a graphic designer and a painter (professionally, though I work in other areas, too). I think Krita is very good at the latter (the customization of the brush is one of the most flexible in the world, including commercial apps) , even if it is not my favorite tool for painting (I use Clip Studio, Affinity, Paintstorm Studio and Rebelle). In my late -Gimp- tests (nightly builds) I truly believe that experienced digital painters can use Gimp for painting very comfortably, while getting as well many image editing related features. Specially with the latest improvements being cooked for the 3.0 RC.
I have made a test painting with these builds and I am impressed. Specially with the ability to work in wider color spaces (Adobe RGB, mostly, finally kind of even more important than CMYK for print projects (but CMYK is very important for many print workflows), but also most professional screen-only illustrations), and the many and very key improvements in tablet support (Wacom, etc), the brush engine and painting in general, it provides the essential functionality for it, but also having so many and important features for image editing, which one ends up needing in most illustration projects, specially for professional work. Krita is much more inclined on the painting side, but not every project needs a traditional oil paint or watercolors feel, and also, one can fake âpaintâ (to a lower degree) with careful customizing of flow, opacity and other customization of the brush in Gimp.
Yet both applications have their use and place. I would deeply dislike if any of the two gets abandoned.
About AI (many painters dislike it and Iâm no exception, I admit it)⌠well⌠In what is image editing, a lot of the AI functions can be done as well with good old retouching/image editing techniques. Most of the times AI speeds it up, as a main advantage. I respect the POV of anyone thinking otherwise, but IMO is not that essential as more core matters, like the color space, non linear editing, live editing, etc. Not only because with the core features you can do almost all of what AI can do (with more time and expertise), but because, anyway, you do need the essential workflows very solid even if using AI, to finalize, export, prepare an image.
And BTW, I absolutely love Blender. I started using it since 2002. Yup, been a long journey. And now itâs gorgeous. Which gives me hope for every graphics related open source project.
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