GIMP vs PS

Why not consider krita?

Who doesn't have a pirated copy of PS already?
also
>gimp
literally gimping yourself. just use paint.net dummy

No one fucking uses GIMP you nerd.

Use gimp for quick ms paint tier edits and photoshop for anything that may require effort

paint.net is much quicker and easier to use than gimp, especially after adding plugins

GIMP is great, especially once you get into a habit of using it regularly and you develop a skill to use it

Photoshop obviously blows it out of the water and is far better for professional level stuff, but it comes with a price

That said, I've been using GIMP for ages professionally and I get by though there's times I wish for PS

Big if true.

I've never used Photoshop. I can make do just fine with GIMP. For the occasional image manipulation

It's not free. You still need to own a license in order to legally use it. So might just as well pirate the latest available version.

Adobe are absolutely not cracking down on piracy it has always been the polar opposite, creative suite remains easy to crack for market penetration.

I work in /gd/ and frontend where my employer is essentially forced to licence CC as learning an entirely new program purely to save a few shekels would make me less efficient and outweigh the meagre £50/m needed for the full creative cloud.

I also have a major problem with how intuitive the interface of free editing software is, if you lay out your menus well, provide good documentation and meaningful shortcuts there's a chance you could cut into Adobe's market share, but good UX is so seldom seen in free software that GIMP or better free alternatives take too long to learn or aren't specialised enough to cause Adobe any problems.

Sketch did it right, they took advantage of Adobe's lack of a UX tool, priced it fairly and got the workflow sorted perfectly, I genuinely use Sketch more than PS now.