"Big Al" wrote

| You can line draw in GIMP. Use the pencil, set the pencil point size,
| left click to make the starting point and then hold the shift key and
| move the pencil to the ending point. It draws a line between points.
| If you leave the shift key down, I think it will draw from point 2 to
| the next point you click and so on.
|

Yes. That's why I said it can sort of be done by
jumping through hoops. Similarly, I can do shapes by
making a selection and then using the fill tool. But
that's not the same. I use lines and shapes a lot. I
don't want extra steps. That's like making a text editor
and telling me that vowels can be typed, too, if I only
hold down Ctrl+Tab+F4 while I press the vowel key.

The odd thing is that a line
is one of the easiest operations to program. The
GIMPers add lots of oddball things (flip, sheer, reverse,
etc) that I've never even figured out. But no line. They
seem to leave it out because they see graphic software
as being in 2 distinct categories of drawing and image
editing.

I'd never actually noticed that peculiar belief until
I tried Photo Demon and noticed the same problem:
It's got a remarkable number of functions, but no
line or shape. For me that makes it all but useless.
I often do hybrids of photos/graphics, or work on Web
images. For instance, the other day I was making an
image to show a comparison of two webpages. I used
gray rectangles to create a background, added text,
and used lines to create arrows from the text,
pointing to each page sample. Not a big deal. A 5
minute project. But I do that kind of thing often. Yet
I have no need of a fancy drawing program. Mostly
I just need lines and shapes.