For Linux, is there something better than GIMP now in 2009?

best regards

photoshop might work under WINE, but doubtful. GIMP is about the best out there. Are you using newest version?

I have heard reports of Photoshop working under Wine (older versions reported not to work), but whether this is 'better' is difficult to say.

I was impressed with Krita when I looked at it ~18 months ago, but how much progress it has made since then I do not know (maybe like the rest of kde it has made negative progress). I think this will be better eventually, but when that will come about...

If you only want something that works more like photoshop, you could try gimpshop, which is a modified version of the gimp in order to work in a more photoshop-like way. Me, I don't know why everyone seems to think the UI of photoshop is so good and want a copy of that. Maybe its just familiarity.

better than gimp for doing what ?

See posts on how to get CS working in linux. Either with wine or a move from windows install.

I was once very proficient with Photoshop, but now I actually prefer GIMP. For Linux-native SW, I doubt if there is--or will be--anything better. In fact, I would discourage an effort to try to compete with GIMP in the Open-Source model----to do so would not be a good use of programming talent.

I think many professionals still need Photoshop and it does in fact run under WINE (or CrossOver). But then, the graphics arts pros tend to favor the Mac.

Hey pixellany

Why do graphic artists in your country / area favor the Mac...?

Just asking, I work in web development, and ppl here who have the money (Mac's are extraordinarily expensive here) always use Macs for graphic design duties.

Can't see the point if you have PCs with XP / Vista and Photoshop CS4, or GIMP on Linux.

Actually there already is an alternative for Gimp in the making and that would be KDE's "Krita" - which sadly is part of Koffice and not just a standalone Qt-application (because, usally, if I want to edit some images, I'm doing this in an office-context and by no means just to do some graphics or to edit photos or to do some buttons or icons for the web, so it's totally useful to embed a graphic's application deeply into an office package so that it's guaranteed that a) everyone has to have installed KDE and b) Koffice... and yes, this is blank sarcasm).

Anyway - it looks promising and as it is based on Image Magick's vast support for image/file types, it seems very flexible.

Last time I tested it was still rather slow, though. But this was with pre-alpha KDE 4.

And not to forget: Image Magick may not have the usal GUI to edit images, but it still is extremely powerful and flexible and can do more or less everything.

(And because Image Magick exists for 15 years or so, the Mac realm adopted it and married it with some nice GUI and called it Pixelmator, but we the Linux world just had to avoid a project like this at all costs.. read this and cry: http://www.pixelmator.com/specs/ )

Tradition.....

Apple pioneered the use of the GUI in mainstream computing, and they did it partly by promoting neat graphics programs. In the early days of Mac vs DOS, there was really no choice.