Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

I'll die on the proverbial hill that the absolute worst instance of this has always been GIMP, which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago.

It was and perhaps still is, a solid competitor to Photoshop, but any unfamiliar grownup is, quite reasonably, going to never ever ever trust anything to do serious work with a name like that.

I agree GIMP is a bad name, but is it really a 'solid' competitor to Photoshop? My impression has been that it was never close to being competitive on features. I've only used either of them very briefly so I may be wildly wrong though.

Wait until you learn about Git. ;)

GIMP has god horrid UX, there's no way it could have eaten Adobes anything. There's lineage of FOSS apps that stick by the "we're not X, we're different from X." mantra.

The discomfort, frustration and unintuitiveness you're feeling from using our app? It's just you!

No, that's not bad design and bad UX! its simply because we are different! We aren't X (Photoshop), we just do things differently here!".

GIMP is quintessential example of this.

Do you have examples of bad UX in recent Gimp versions that's not simply "no time to improve it" (still mostly volunteer project)?

I believe Gimp could never enter the professional circles because it's internals are too tied to one, single colour model (RGB).

Professionals in many fields use tools with very bad UI/UX.

IIRC, it was too expensive to make Gimp support non-RGB color spaces needed for professional image editing.

I use it semi-regularly and it does a great job for me, and most of UX is clear and obvious (high DPI support is lacking). But I haven't used Photoshop since the 90s (or Aldus PhotoStyler before it was acquired by Adobe ;)).

I used GIMP before I ever used Photoshop. My experience was the opposite. I think that means the UIs are different, but there is no one that is objectively better, it's just a matter of what your expectations are, which are set by whatever you learned first.

As for CMYK support: why do designers even need to use this? Sure, not every RGB is the same, and it took some while before we even got sRGB as some standard, but the same goes for CMYK: every printer has its own profile. I had the displeasure of trying to get the CMYK profile of a "professional" printing company that only accepted files in CMYK, and they didn't even know which profile their printers used. Ideally you would send a RGB file including the display profile your screen uses, and then the printing facility converts that to whatever CMYK they need.

Of course there are also special colors or effects outside of RGB/CMYK that you might want to use when printing something, that's something else.

> which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago.

That "perhaps" is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence. GIMP has never, even now, been a serious competitor to Adobe's products for professionals. To suggest that if they simply had a better name they would be the top dog is laughable.