true that it wasn’t good for mac. I gave up apple/mac and their increasingly shitty overpriced products 10 years ago. Since then Linux has come a long way and so has GIMP. Good enough to kill Photoshop? Not any time soon, but good enough for professional use certainly and good enough for new artists to start on. Install G’MIC and it’s so much better.

some open source projects have very unpleasant communities around them, GIMP is not one of them. very easy to get into and everyone is extremely helpful and friendly.

Linux comes (at least on Mint and Ubuntu) with the poppler-utils suite of tools. you can merge, extract pages, even rip all the images out of a pdf in source quality. very useful.

Maybe you mean a more “brush and canvas” interface without complexity and distraction. I’m an artist that uses gimp. They are both great, Krita is just made with ease of use and emulation of irl tools in mind. GIMP can do emulation stuff too, but it can also do tons of other things, even video fx and animation.