If you’re going to run windows in a VM, then what’s the point? Why not just run one OS?

And for a while, people using tapes to make field recordings were supposed to pay more for the blanks to offset the supposed lost sales of the unrelated music industry.

GIMP had some shitty shortcuts, sure. But so did PS.

As an example of better shortcuts - you could get a rectangular selection by pressing “r”, which is an example of a very simple and straightforward UI language. You could then adjust that selection with handles without needing any chords or modifiers, zoom in with the number keys or scroll wheel, etc.

You could open a tool, like the colour picker, and switch to a different window without the app going beep and telling you “no”, which is what PS traditionally did.

You could open the app and load an image in 1/10th the time it took for PS to start which made it way nicer to use. When I was using PS I generally left it open all the time because of its sluggish start, which meant it was sitting hogging resources all day.

What I’m saying is that your personal workflow and the general UX of whatever software you’re used to using is always the thing you’re going to use as a point of comparison, and if your expected shortcut is different it doesn’t mean it’s worse.

I used PS from v3 (I think?) to CS2 (ish?) before switching to GIMP. I thought the interface was weird until a designer at my job showed me where I was getting confused. So I’ve been a semi-regular G user for the last million years and every once in a while I offer to help my partner with something in PS and honestly I take so long to get anything done because I can’t find it in the PS UI.

“Professionals” is one of those words, you know, like “consumer” or whatever, that does a lot to hide what’s really going on. I’m a professional who used to use GIMP all the time for my work. I’m not less of a professional because I didn’t like Photoshop, in fact, I used to use PS at previous jobs but gave it up because I prefer the GIMP interface (yes, I’m that person) and didn’t need the other bits. “Professional” just means you do it as a job; it doesn’t indicate what that job is, and different people have different use cases.

They kind of do, though?