I remember when this project was in young age and I saw it the first time. I thought to myself “ah yeah, it’s nice to have but one of those projects no one will care in the industry”. And here we are, Godot (12y) rivaling industry giant like Unity (20y).

I had to look at the scroll bar to see how long this is still going.

Congratz on the publishing. :-)

I never had this issue since I use GIMP decades ago. But I know in older GIMP versions (and I mean up to relatively recent versions) loading can take very long if you have ton of fonts. I don’t know how long it has been since you tried it out. There was attempts to asynchronously load fonts and other optimizations to make it start up fast. At least for me GIMP starts… let me test it again… in less than a second. Having a fast drive plays definitely a role here too.

And it depends what method you used to install. If it was Snap on Ubuntu in example, well that is on Snap most probably.

I use GIMP since 2.8 version, which is ages ago. Used it to edit my photography, to create price tags for my local shop, create web banners, memes… lot of memes, editing pixel graphics, and more.

To be honest it was not a good experience editing photography, especially as it didn’t have some standard features like layer effects. And the missing standard features like shape tools and such is also a big deal for me. Also for printing the price tags the color space was a problem too, as it didn’t support CMYK. I also wish there was a simple “record and playback macros” functionality, which I saw in Photoshop years ago.

All in all these points and many other are addressed or are being addressed right now. GIMP is still not as good as Photoshop and there are pain points. But it is improving and already has improved ton of a lot.

Windows-only,

There are new attempts of patching WINE to make modern Photoshop run on Linux. It’s not fully there, but looks promising: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-Staging-11.1