Imagine you spend a career training on something and random people just tell you to do something else.

Yes I've tried those alternative solutions and they don't have the same sort of polish and workflow as everything else. Find me ONE professional graphics designer who works 100% in GIMP and Inkscape - they just don't have the same feature set. If you do find people using GIMP and Inkscape in the professional world they almost always use them in conjunction with Adobe tools.

I have a specific list of needed features that do not have parity. "Doing something else" isn't an option when you don't have the tools to do your job/can't deliver for the customer because the software can't support what the printer needs...

In all reality I'm constantly adding new capability to my gfx workflow via software/hardware. I've switched completely over to Procreate on an iPad to do illustration. "Doing something else" is something I'm willing to do if it has value.

GIMP and Inkscape provide zero value to me - they're 100% neutered solutions/"toys" in the professional world. Open source folks (as much as I am one myself) want to think that there's a 1:1 tool for every piece of pro-level software out there and it's simply not the case =|

My partner does, as do a number of studios and collectives I know in Rotterdam, Brussels, Paris and Porto. They use of course way more tools than Gimp and Inkscape, but work on Linux and exclusively with Free and Open Source software.

For them I feel it’s both about the philosophy, the challenge, and discovering new ways of working. Trying to reproduce an Adobe way of working will always feel lacking. Yet working in a free software ecosystem will make you also discover new tools (Latex, Graphviz etc.) and new ways of working (a lot of people are experimenting with doing print layout with HTML for example).

Of course sometimes it is painful--preparing for print production and especially spot colours without Adobe Acrobat is difficult and requires a a collaborative process with your printer. But it also comes with the thrill of trying a different creative model and the exchange with a small but thriving community of people who are excited about these things.

EDIT: This is not to say that it would be a viable approach for everyone. It’s just to say that such designers do exist, and to try to make their motivations more clear!

Sure - somewhere they exist. But I have yet to run into one in my career. Real question: are they doing paid production work?

I just simply cannot fathom passing off the cost of using buggy/incomplete tooling to my customer so I'm curious if it's people just producing for the open source community using open source tools?

Not trying to rip on your statement, but that's the only reason I can fathom using these tools in any professional context.

Broken tools cost my client money.

Sure, and on the contrary I've added Procreate on an iPad as my new illustration workflow because it absolutely kills vs. my old Photoshop/Wacom technique.

This isn't a "I'm not willing to try new tools/invest time into learning because I'm comfortable" thing... it's a GIMP/Inkscape are not capable thing.

I use Inkscape and Gimp at work, very tiny minor part of a small part of my workflow.

Today Inkscape was crashing when I tried to rotate a spline with six nodes in an otherwise empty workspace.

I’m probably going to buy a commercial vector graphics app even though my employer won’t pay for it because that sort of bug is a show stopper right when I need the program most.

Yep - similar experience with Inkscape. I mean - yeah it's fun and it's pretty capable but it's just really not capable of real work. It's a toy/open source "entry-level" piece of software.

Now imagine someone who needs to crank out 40 unique pieces of vector art within 4-5 days. There's NO WAY they can AFFORD to use Inkscape with those sort of stability issues.

You might as well ask: why not use hobbyist tools with a subset of the features and a tiny fraction of development time and UX work, that basically nobody else in your industry uses?

In a professional setting you can't even think about replacing the established tools with the open source equivalents in the majority of scenarios.

Welcome to HN though - it's filled with really really smart people who want to be right about everything. If I'm being honest I'm one of them too ;)

Cheers!

Edit: HN's really gone downhill. I thought we didn't downvote with feelings around here? All I did was point out that it's a legitimate question for people who don't have much experience with Photoshop, GIMP, etc.

Sincerely, Person who has spent ~2-3x as much time in The Gimp as in Photoshop, and first learned image editing on Paint Shop Pro, not Photoshop, but would still choose PS if you told me to edit some images and my life depended on it, especially if I also couldn't use Google to look up how to do basic freakin' things.

If you're suggesting GIMP and Inkscape to someone coming from a pro-level career/background it shows complete ignorance on the topic.

Lots of the time I see this sort of brazen opensource can replace anything/everything attitude - it's simply not true + very idealist. It's likely a ton of pros who use graphics software are coming through and expressing similar thoughts through the downvote button... which in some ways is a "don't take this seriously" button.

Anywho - I agree that the parent comment shouldn't be downvoted, it's a legitimate question to ask if you have no experience in graphics.

Similarly GIMP has a lot of oddities that Adobe would have found unacceptable in Photoshop versions released 25 years ago. You can do real work in GIMP, but the polish just isn't there.