I honestly think a lot of the hate that GIMP gets is because as the first major FOSS image editor, people tried to use it for everything with a lot of square ho

I honestly think a lot of the hate that GIMP gets is because as the first major FOSS image editor, people tried to use it for everything with a lot of square hole round peg situations. In particular, it’s a photo editor at core. You can use it for postprocessing of other image types if you want, or for pasting together memes or whatever. But it’s not designed for e.g. doing illustrations or digital painting or sketches This isn’t even unique to GIMP in that way. Photoshop is also a sub par art program (though admittedly they’re a little more flexible than GIMP). But if you wanted something better for than Photoshop and were ok with proprietary windows/mac software there’s clip studio paint and before that there was paint tool sai etc. While until the rise of Krita being actually good (having tried it many times over the years prior, that’s some time around 2018) if you wanted Linux or just wanted FOSS, you had to use Gimp and that breed resentment at it being the wrong tool