The GIMP is the reason I started messing with Linux. I
waswatching all my graphic designer buddies turn out slick
Webpages using Adobe Photoshop, and figured if I got
Photoshopmyself I could do some fancy art of my own. But
Photoshopwas $500! And the GIMP was FREE -- if I was willing
to learnenough about Linux to make it run.Let me tell you, all that learning was worth the
effort.Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball, who run GIMP.org,
havemade one of the world's finest graphics programs. I
haven'teven started to explore all of its features, and as
soon asI get one thing figured out, like layering, they come
upwith a new trick and add it to the program.
There are
over 100 plug-ins available already for the GIMP,and more
keep coming all the time. The list of GIMP featuresis too
long to list here. You'll have to go to the GIMP homepage to
see them.
One extraordinary thing The GIMP will do, being
a Linuxprogram, that Photoshop won't do on either a Mac or a
Wintelcomputer, is juggle an almost unlimited number of
openwindows without crashing, which is especially useful
foranimation. It supports almost every useful file format,
too,so you can share your GIMP-created work with people
usingless-sophisticated graphics tools and other
operatingsystems without any problems.
For a long time,
the only thing The GIMP didn't have was agood manual, but
now that lack has been overcome. You canfind an excellent
GIMP manual here, and I
stronglyrecommend that you at least glance through it before
youdownload and start using The GIMP.
Linux 
