This should be helpful for people that learned Photoshop in the past (for work or in school). From what I understand, a lot of the friction with GIMP is the workflow differences, and potentially unintuitive UI/UX choices.
tldr: recovering Adobe Photoshop user shows you features in the very free and very open source gnu image manipulation program :D
my relevant GIMP config files: https://github.com/BreadOnPenguins/dots/tree/master/.config/GIMP/3.0
GIMP documentation: https://www.gimp.org/docs/
Most Wayland compositors don not have the concept of multiple windows being one application. And you cannot always control how and where they appear.
This is not a Wayland complaint. Just pointing out that old GIMP was just not very compatible with the core Design of Wayland.
Depending on what compositor you use, a lot of this has really improved.
and not for a lack of proposals either, they just languish there obstructed by certain parties