Why gimpshop-ng ?

A lot of people new to Ubuntu or Gimp say that Photoshop is better than Gimp but it's hard to really know what's better in Photoshop.
When you try to get more information, you often realize that people are just more used to Photoshop and that they can't get the same results with Gimp because they don't want to bother learning a new interface (and mainly new keyboard shortcuts).

There might be some real differences between Gimp and Photoshop, but until we lift this artificial barrier that is represented by a different user interface then it will remain a hard task to study the differences between the two software.

There was a similar project named gimpshop but it's not maintained and anyway it has some serious flaws.
- There is no reason to fork the entire Gimp project to make a few modifications. We can clearly see the bad consequences of this : no maintainer, no updates and gimpshop is stuck to v 2.2 for eternity.
- Forking the entire project has another drawback, a download of several megabytes instead of small scripts or config files.
- It install another version gimp on the system where all we wanted is different user settings!
FAQ #765: “Why gimpshop-ng ?”.

"A lot of people new to Ubuntu or Gimp say that Photoshop is better than Gimp but it's hard to really know what's better in Photoshop."

Of course it isn't hard. There are tons of flamewars on teh internetz where people point out weak sides of GIMP :)

And in these very same flamewars, other users point out some existing solution to extend Gimp so it has these missing features. It's hard to know what really is impossible in Gimp since most of the users who point out missing features haven't really tried to go to the boundaries of Gimp.

The goal of Gimpshop-ng is to offer an installer for Gimp that brings its functionality level very close to Photoshop's.