GIMP vs PhotoShop?

[Midgardsormr]

I never noticed any lag while navigating in the OS. It did lag in the 3d sculpting application, but everything does when you're dealing with millions of polygons.

[Axiom]

Its all a matter of preference as previously stated. Personally, i dislike the interface on GIMP, don't ask me why, just something about it drives me bonkers.

[AlanShutko]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is to look at the help you can get: tutorials, blogs, people to ask questions. On the broader internet, there seem to be an awful lot of PS tutorials and fewer Gimp ones, but the Guild has a bunch of really great Gimp tutorials and folks who are amazingly generous at giving people help with Gimp.

[Redrobes]

One of the biggest things Photoshop can do that GIMP can't is CMYK separations: if that's important to you, GIMP is not what you want.

It is very true that if you want to go to a commercial printers then they will only know adobe products. But if you do want to do CMYK conversions to professional standards then there is a free utility called littlecms which is what I used to do my colour profiles for commercial print many years back. Thats free and extremely good at what its supposed to be for. Written by a chap who's day job is colour profiling and CMYK conversions. I expect that Xara can do the job too.

Oh on the topic of pen tablets. I have one I could post to anyone who wants it in the UK. Its old about A5 and uses serial port not USB and needs a PS2 style keyboard input on PC as well for power. And not guaranteed to work and needs a new AAAA battery for the pen to see if it does work. But it would be free to a good home. We got a wacom bamboo recently with USB port instead.