I've tried gimp on a few occasions, thinking it would be easier than pirating PS. It ran so slow on my relatively fast laptop (1hz updates when using brushes) meant it was of no use for anything but simple filter adjustments to existing pictures.

That's probably an issue with Gtk on Windows. That's not much of an excuse, but I can tell you for a fact that recent GIMP versions run much faster on Linux than even an older version (5 or 6, for example) of Photoshop runs on Windows on the same hardware.

Impressive - I might have to give it a try again...next time. I already have cs3 installed now.

I have to admit that I've recently converted to lightroom. I wasn't able to achieve some of the things I wanted to do with Picasa, especially when shooting models.

It has a ton more functionality, but i'm sticking to only what I need to do to realize the original image I shot.

Photoshop CS4 probably runs faster than 5 or 6 on same hardware because of added optimizations, though. I know that it screams on my hardware...

I'm looking at putting Ubunutu 9.10 on one of my machines soon I'd like to try GIMPY on it to see what's different.

I think the last version of Photoshop I used was 7...haven't even looked at a "CS" version of any app. But I'm guessing there have been some major changes since then. Recent development of GIMP has been more conservative, apparently focusing on performance rather than features? So I can see why a lot of people might look at it as primative compared to PS. Personally I don't recall seeing anything special added to Photoshop after version 5.5, so GIMP doesn't disappoint me. Your kilometerage may vary.

One thing I am disappointed with, though, is the continuing lack of decent, stable multimedia editing tools available for linux, so you might want to keep that in mind when checking out Ubuntu.

Ubuntu needs a video editor big time, a decent one.
wish they'd tune up cinelarra for it.

I like gimp, but I wish it was a bit more like ps with the layers and masking. Right now its still wierd, like fractal design painter was for years.

The CS products are so bloated.
Premiere or PS before CS, less than 100 megs for the actual proggies, after CS over a gig and up to 2.5 now for prem.

What's the point of getting all these multiproc machines and 4 gigs of ram standard if vista aeros gonna gobble it then your bloatware appz are gonna drive it into the ground.

The ArtistX ubuntu fork is neat, but it's still bloated and doesn't always work.

If I had a million bucks I'd pay for gimp, blender and cinellarra to be brought up to professional par and bundled into a slim ubuntu distro.

Speaking of Blender, have you tried 2.5 yet? It's currently Alpha. But I really like what they've done with the interface.

Haven't looked at 2.5 myself, though it's time, I think. On a similar note, GIMP 2.8 will apparently be getting a gui overhaul as well...definitely looking forward to that.

In the video editor department, I was thinking of looking at a new one called OpenShot, although for Debian Lenny it would mean building it, which I've mostly moved away from for most apps. Also the proprietary Lightworks is going to be open-sourced at some point in the near future (license unknown at this time).

I installed Pitivi a few days ago, but so far have had no luck getting it to load any video clips =op

I had just "tried" OpenShot last week after hearing some good things about it. I opened it, it crashed, I opened again, it crashed, I quit.