> If you continue to put up a 'Photoshop' barrier, then you will never be able to consider any alternatives
It's an industry/education barrier more than anything else. Photoshop has been the standard for years because it generally works quite well and is supported on the two major desktop operating systems.
> assume Photoshop will never happen on Linux
Probably not, no money in it for Adobe. I've always said I'd happily pay for a commercial Linux OS developed by Adobe that ran Creative Suite.
> it may even already exist
It doesn't.
> the developers behind OS alternatives will never know what functionality you require if all the details you give are "Photoshop"
No offence but you're kind of talking about Photoshop like it's MS Paint. It's a ubiquitous, massively bloated, complicated piece of software (10 million LOC, roughly the same as the Linux kernel?) that can take years to master.
