You clearly don't know photoshop. A better comparison is Notepad vs VIM or Notepad vs Emacs. Notepad kind of works. You load, save, copy/cut/paste, find, save. What else do you need? Vim and Emacs have a learning curve but are way more powerful.
If you don't understand how much more powerful Vim and Emacs are over notepad, most people who do know the difference would see the flaw in your opinion that all 3 are text editors and one is as good as another.
The same is true of Photoshop vs gIMP. Photoshop has non-destructive editing. gIMP does not. That alone is a huge force multiplier. Photoshop has non-destructive layer and group styles, gIMP does not have layer styles as all. That's just few of the 100s of features Photoshop has that gIMP doesn't. They're not just minor features, they're force multipliers and game changers. gIMP has been planning to add the major ones for 15yrs or so but for whatever reasons has not gotten there.
> Photoshop has non-destructive editing. gIMP does not. That alone is a huge force multiplier.
Oh yes. I'm not using Photoshop, but some hidden-secret alternative developed by two brothers from Bavaria (PhotoLine), because I'm only doing some small-scale private hobbyist stuff, and an (even at the time) slightly older version of their software had been included for free in a photography-themed edition of some computer magazine.
That old version didn't have non-destructive layer effects (although even at that time it already supported non-destructive scaling/rotating/shearing of layers, which was quite nice, and which I gather GIMP doesn't support even today?). As my proficiency with it grew, I started running more and more into the limitations of that, until I eventually decided that maybe I should finally just buy a license for the current version of the software, since of the features it had gained in the intervening years was indeed non-destructive editing.
This turned out to be absolutely the right decision, because non-destructive layers are indeed a game changer. No more making lots of backup copies of layers, no more clumsily noting down somewhere in the layer names or wherever what sort of effects I had applied in case I needed to re-tweak something, non-destructive liquifying, etc. etc. Plus a few nifty other features, and still the same familiar UI despite the large version jump, so absolutely no reason to regret the upgrade.
If you don't understand how much more powerful Vim and Emacs are over notepad, most people who do know the difference would see the flaw in your opinion that all 3 are text editors and one is as good as another.
The same is true of Photoshop vs gIMP. Photoshop has non-destructive editing. gIMP does not. That alone is a huge force multiplier. Photoshop has non-destructive layer and group styles, gIMP does not have layer styles as all. That's just few of the 100s of features Photoshop has that gIMP doesn't. They're not just minor features, they're force multipliers and game changers. gIMP has been planning to add the major ones for 15yrs or so but for whatever reasons has not gotten there.
https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-suppor...