GIMP 3.0 is over 96% complete! The GIMP team got sick at the Libre Arts conference over the summer, hence the setback to the release schedule but they are now back making good progress.
Along with non-destructive editing and a colour overhaul we’ve all been waiting for, longstanding critics of the UI/UX will be pleased to hear that GIMP are setting up a UX repository and are looking to build a dedicated team of designers to develop this.
All of these things look set to make the GIMP project feel a lot more current and dynamic. I can’t wait!
And if anyone wants to help out it looks like testing/reporting, donations and updating the help manual are all welcomed by the project at the moment.
For those of you looking for adobe alternatives the affinity suite is quite good too, I don’t think it is open source and it is not free but you can make a lifetime license purchase that is not really all that expensive, I think it is one of the best adobe alternatives at the moment because it is so similar both in tools and the ecosystem.
At the moment the rest are all ones that compete with specific adobe apps like darktable being better than lightroom as an example.
I like gimp but all of these software alternatives will just land in a similar spot where the only cohesiveness is that the files can be exported/imported between eachother.
Affinity is really great. The only problem is that i can’t install it on my OS of choice.
true but fear not it can be ran on wine by compiling a custom version and installing .net and everything it needs, but its quite buggy and there is no opencl hardware acceleration on wine from my testing.
and why they dont wanna make a linux build can additionally be found here:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/98932-faq-affinity-on-linux/
There’s Winapps, too. It isn’t very easy to install the first time and requires a bit of group policy tweaking on the VM to remove compression, though. Other than that, it works well on my end.
https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
I seen smth like this but ngl the preformance might be worse due to vms overhead there is also wine overhead yes but the vm overhead is worse.
Affinity really is a great alternative and it’s relatively cheap. There was a concern that when Canvas bought the company they would force a subscription model on it but apparently that’s not the case (yet).
I like photopea for quick things, myself.
https://www.photopea.com/
People here always complain about it being ad supported, but I don’t care. It’s Photoshop on the web developed by one dude.