I am really curious to see what happens with GIMP when they finally release 3.0 ( before May hopefully ).
3.0 will introduce CMYK, non-destructive editing, and other pro-level features. So it will be interesting to see if more people suddenly find that it is a viable Photoshop alternative.
Even more interesting potentially is that nee features can actually ship. It has literally been years now that new ideas get lost in dev versions that nobody uses. Going forward, improvements can be added to stable releases that people will actually use. It could be a game changer for the project.