GImp, though much improved, is certainly still much worse than Photoshop*. My biggest complaint about PS is that all the stupid do-dads they've bolted on since about version 6 should be offered as optional plug-ins. And the drm and now cloud bullshit.
But the interface is actually about as good as it gets for such a complex and powerful set of tools. There's loads of people (mainly professional photographers) who only need to perform a few rote enhancements to their boring pictures of weddings, corporate smurfs and hamburgers. So for them the GUI and learning curve could be significant drawbacks. But hey, that's what instagram is for.
* full disclosure: I love using gimp.
I guess I put up with Inkscape (and its bad performance on the Mac) because it's the only vector drawing thing I've found that has a decent amount of features. I forget what exactly but I looked at several and they were all missing some obvious feature that I use a lot (and by "a lot" I mean "a lot on the rare occasions I actually need to use a vector drawing program").
And as to Gimp, well, no Layer Styles = no good tbh.
Pro photographers would probably do better using Lightroom if they're only doing rote enhancements. Way quicker.
Windows Ain't. It sucks. :-(
One thing I really like about Inkscape is that it's quite powerful for doing conversions and stuff on the command line.
Received the invitation to "upgrade" to Windows 8.1 yesterday. Painfully slow process, what with all the verifying, tidying, evaluating, cleaning, applying, finalizing, tidying a few more things... ugh. Probably could have accomplished the same things in less time in other ways as I already use Classic Shell.
Just don't like Ain't. I have no need for the Metro/Live tiles silliness (to me) on a laptop/desktop. Of course I probably would still be OK with Windows 2000. :-P
Had my first look at it yesterday when I had to install some fonts on my boss's new dell desktop. Weird shit. In font previews they looked ok. Word 2013 displayed the fonts in the menu correctly, and it printed the fonts correctly, but in actual document display reverted to generic sans with weird kernings. These are fonts that work with no issues on Win7/Word 2013. After several tries I worked out that 8.1 doesn't support postscript fonts, only TT. Way to go, Microsoft!
You'll probably find that it supports OT too. I have a funny feeling that, with the advent and acceptance of OT, PS may be going the way of the dodo.
OT is just a wrapper format. Office 2013 doesn't support OTF ps (at least not my fonts), only OTF tt. Based on my limited research, it seems font support depends on the type of printer you have hooked up, in this case a PCL6. As I said, it printed the ps fonts flawlessly, but Word couldn't display them properly. But I goofed when I said Win7/Word2013, it was Win7/Word 2010 they do work in. So it may actually be an Office 2013 font rendering bug, as some research I did appears to indicate.
Wrappers do my fucking head in.