I have a hard time seeing anything named "Gimp" ever becoming a great alternative for Photoshop.
Names have a lot of meaning, you think about it constantly, if you are thinking about a crippled person unconsciously even while developing software, maybe that is why Gimp is in the state it is.
Many Open Source projects are just named damn stupidly, like with the KDE suite does it really make any sense naming your projects starting with "K" just to follow the KDE ?
Or with Gnome you have so many stupid project names, beginning with the whole name "Gnome". All I can think is a forest gnome when I think about that desktop environment. Maybe it's supposed to be Ge-nome, but who thinks it's a good idea to call a desktop environment a small dwarf like bearded old person .. Combine that with Gnome Gimp, you have a crippled forest gnome handling your image editing, nice.
Everytime I try Linux and it's modern desktop environments, the application names just make me cringe, it's like somebody just decided that "Yeah hey naming conventions for software don't matter, just call it the terminal emulator "Kerminal" or whatever shit that suites the stupid naming scheme.
> you think about it constantly
Wait, really? The name of the tool is something to think about "constantly"? Why?!
To me, seriously dismissing a tool because of the name is like failing an IQ test. It is a sign of someone that wants to be spoon-fed by any sort of shit that is offered by the big companies, as long as it is packaged in nice colors.
Why? Because if you use the application, you are thinking about the name of the application. You think about "Launching Affinity Photo" for example. What if the name of the software was CripplePhoto, I mean that wouldn't be too nice to think about, or "ShitSoft FecesEditor".
Or even more not so extreme examples, for examples let's say your music player would be called "Brown Juice" or something like that, would you be happy about that application, vs for example "iTunes" or "Soundamp" or whatever.
You know these are extreme examples but just show you that the power of words is very clear in what kind of images they create in our thinking, I bet if Gimp would change their software name to something like "GNU PhotoEdit" or something like that, more people would be willing unconsciously to work and improve it also vs working on this "Gimp" that still uses that silly logo with the Gnome Mascot. It's very unprofessional and you wont attract the best designers or developers if you don't think about the big picture.
That's just my view on the thing. The package and nice colors matter, but of course the interiors and working of the software is that matters more, and on that frontend Gimp just doesn't cut it. What I'm trying to say is that maybe they could make the software better by changing it's name and design.
I mean, no professional uses Gimp for photo editing, at least I don't know anyone besides some hobbyist who rarely use photo editing, they might use Gimp. Or am I wrong ?
Argumentum ad absurdum.
> I mean, no professional uses Gimp for photo editing
Perhaps because the lack of CMYK, the limited architecture for plugin, or the outdated UI have more to do than the name?
If the name was the real bottleneck for adoption, you can be sure that you'd see someone creating a fork with different branding and being widely successful. Oh, wait. It has been tried already! [0]