Currently the tools and layer windows are on top of the image. You either have to close those little windows, or constantly move them around.

They should be better integrated in the main window so that the image is not (partly) hidden by those tool-windows and that the tools-windows can simply be minimised in the top or side of the main window like photoshop has it since CS3.

note. I do not want to mirror PS, but this is simply very very handy of photoshop.

Adobe has a Creative Suite with a unified look and feel that is very easy to work with for people who daily work with the Adobe Creative Suite programs.

Information about Adobe Creative Suite:
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/

Information about Gimp, Inkscape and Scribus:
http://www.gimp.org
http://www.inkscape.org
http://www.scribus.net

Well, right now, if you're using the GIMP and don't know what the actual button is for what you want to do, chances are that you'll have to use a tooltip. This takes time, and while it's a very short amount of time, it can add up to be perhaps more than it really should.

Reactiveness: It's important go a great majority of users. Tooltips, while informative, are not reactive in nature.

What's odd about the GIMP? Tooltips are used almost exclusively for descriptions, but the GIMP places prospective labels to buttons in their tooltips as well. Perhaps relegating tooltips to take on this additional task isn't the best choice.

What would I envision in its stead?

Okay, say you've got your mouse hovered over a button on the GIMP toolbar. There is an area of text above the mess of buttons that will tell you the prospective label of that button. When no button is being hovered over, it defaults to the prospective label of the selected tool.

I have seen this kind of revealing used primarily in games and gaming systems. Take, for example, this screenshot from Majora's Mask:

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/image_viewer/frame_lead.php?pid=197770&img=32

Not one item in that menu throughout the game will have a label beside it, yet there's still a place you can expect the Deku Nut label to show up when you're navigating through the menu.

Gimp addons/plugins list by default software addon for easy access for users without experience. It should be an external program in the Applications-Graphics-Gimp plugins also called quick plugins list access software. Additional software managed by 3rd party, Ubuntu community and users. Www site and repositories are not easy to use for everybody. Run software, choose install/uninstall plugin, that is it. Easy.

When I work in GIMP I often need to do something with several layers at a time; duplicate 5 layers at the same time, or delete a couple layers at a time.

At the moment, it is not possible to select multiple layers which causes me to do these actions to all of the layers separately. It would make my work easier, and more efficient if several layers can be selected simultaneously with the help of the Control or Shift buttons.

I recently started using Ubuntu after getting a virus on my windows install. I generally like the OS, but one of the things that bugs me when compared to windows is the way the file browser handles images. It does not show the preview of images inside a folder so i have hard time knowing what a folder actually contains, and it usually gives you very small preview images so i have to click on each one individually to get a bigger view. I do a lot of digital artwork, so i have thousands of images on my HD. I have tried a bunch of Ubuntu ad on programs for browsing images, but they do not compare to the windows file browser in my opinion.

(my suggestion is that you create the file browser interface with more consideration for visual media)

We are constantly discussing the relative benefits of open source software when compared to its commercial counterparts, and GIMP has somewhat become the posterboy for this ideology as it compares very favorably to Photoshop the industry standard software for image processing.
However, GIMP suffers from several omissions which mean that many professionals cannot see it as a viable alternative and as such cannot make the switch to linux.
The most obvious of these is the inability to edit in CMYK as opposed to RGB making GIMP impractical for individuals making images for print as opposed to digital distribution.

I'm sure this one will drop like a rock, but I had to say it.

Every time I tell a friend about GIMP there is almost always some amount of snickering going on.

When I start my photo editor, I don't want to be reminded of leather clad sex slaves. Do you?

I see this a lot on the Internet, starters that want to have a site without learning scripting languages. They want it to be done in a short time, but still want it to look good. So they go to people to let them make it for them, and afterwards they pay these people. I know they should learn scripting languages but some people just don't have their interests in there.

Gimp needs support for 8, 16, and 32-bit per-channel images like Photoshop does and Cinepaint (http://www.cinepaint.org/ ).