He has barebones GIMP

Theres nothing wrong with not downloading plugins if you don't need them in the first place.

That's s bullshit argument.

Sure, there's no way they can compete with some of the PS's more advanced features like 3D effects and smart selection and sheer speed of executing everything, but there's no reason they can't add some basic QOL features. It doesn't even have clipping masks by default as far as I know, it's fucking embarrassing. Moving and transforming selections and opening new images and a lot of the most simple image manipulation things in GIMP are unintuitive and just a pain in the ass to use.

Even Krita is starting to speed ahead of GIMP IN IMAGE MANIPULATION even though it was intended for digital painting. The only problem Krita has is that some features are slow and unpolished/unfinished.

Might be easier if there was a resource telling me what the fuck all the good plugins are and where to get them. Unfortunately, the GIMP plug-in community is a fucking mess.

...

IT'S 2017

I use barebones GIMP without any addons. Mad?
Don't care since i don't draw, i just edit images.

I do a lot of image compositing. GIMP has such a horriblw workflow and terrible tools for that kind of work.

Do you guys prefer single-window or multi-window mode?

Krita is miles ahead of GIMP but it needs work on real-time rendering, Photoshop is still faster for me.

This is also a good option if you're already comfortable with GIMP's interface.

I change my window sizes a lot so multi-window mode is very annoying, plus I hate it when toolbars are in the way of something.

Krita has pretty bad performance with large pixel sizes, but Photoshop is tons faster than pretty much anything.

I hope the Krita devs make the focus of a whole new version to be improving performance one of these days. It's hard to draw with large canvas sizes and it's one of the reasons I'm tempted to use PS again.

Xfce4 is the definitive WM.