Krita > GIMP, absolutely, but unfortunately both of them are centuries behind any proprietary software despite only being decades old. And I'm not even talking about PAID proprietary software. Free apps are also better.
A frequent issue with FOSS is that they can handle a variety of edge cases because some technical person needed it once and went through the trouble of implementing it, but they offer a subpar experience at basic cases.
They'll add a feature because it was in the bug tracker and then say "it's done," and you need to hold a committee for 6 months in the forum to change anything in it. Meanwhile a proprietary app made by 1 person will gain 30 different niceties to the basic feature in 1 week.
It's just very hard to imagine how an application that existed for 20 years can't select multiple layers at once or reorder its brushes. It almost feels like abandonware at this point, despite them getting new features from time to time.
Depending on your use case, fire alpaca, azpainter, graphics gale.
The problem is that Krita/GIMP have many features that very few people use. Like you have digital artists who don't need CMYK, but the entire application needs to support it. Or you have people who want to write text on images. Or people that want to do photo manipulation. Or people who need to make assets for games. Or even doing something weird like saving a PNG without pre-multiplied alpha.
So whenever you compare it with something else, you're able to point out to all these features they accumulated through the years.
But if you started making an app today for a specific use case, in 1 month you would be able to add features that these applications have lacked for decades, and these will be just the first features you'll be able to think of.
So it's always this strange feeling where an application clearly has had a lot of work put into it and yet seems to lack something extremely basic you would expect to find in an application that has had a lot of work put into it.
A frequent issue with FOSS is that they can handle a variety of edge cases because some technical person needed it once and went through the trouble of implementing it, but they offer a subpar experience at basic cases.
They'll add a feature because it was in the bug tracker and then say "it's done," and you need to hold a committee for 6 months in the forum to change anything in it. Meanwhile a proprietary app made by 1 person will gain 30 different niceties to the basic feature in 1 week.
It's just very hard to imagine how an application that existed for 20 years can't select multiple layers at once or reorder its brushes. It almost feels like abandonware at this point, despite them getting new features from time to time.