Affinity Photo vs. Gimp 3.0

[pipet]

A few weeks ago, I made Linux my main OS. I'm still dual booting into Win10 mainly to use a couple of photo editing apps, Affinity Photo among those. I read at a good number of threads on this topic, but it seems like a Linux-native version of AP is out of the question. I have looked into ways to make AP work under Linux, but the Wine/Bottles approach didn't work, CrossOver (a commercial Wine branch) apparently works better, but at $700 for a persistent license is out the question. I tried a VM, but without GPU support that's not a great option either (bare-metal pass-through requires two GPUs , which I can't accommodate and vGPU support doesn't yet work with Window hosts on Qemu/KVM).

So, I'm pondering to substitute AP with Gimp 3.0. I have read many claims that AP is far superior to Gimp 2.1, but I'd be interested, if that is still true for Gimp 3.0. I have started to explore Gimp (the 3.0 RC2 release), but I don't know enough about Gimp at this point, to judge, if it can be a viable alternative to AP, and if it would be worth investing more time in? Apparently, the new version of Gimp now has some non-destructive editing capabilities, which in the past was the main point of contention. It can't handle a CMYK workflow, but that's not something I need. I do the bulk editing in a raw developer (C1, but am switching to RawTherapee) and need AP for either compositing, or selective edits that the raw developer can't handle. I was wondering, if someone can offer an informed opinion on Affinity Photo vs. Gimp 3.0?

[Catshill]

Run APh on a second computer running Windows? Not exactly expensive to pick up a reasonable spec and you can go small form factor if space is an issue.

[dominik]

6 hours ago, pipet said:

So, I'm pondering to substitute AP with Gimp 3.0.

I suggest you try it on your own, e.g. by installing Portable Apps and there Gimp. This way it is not intrusive to your computer at all.

I did use Gimp in the past occasionally and did not like it. The newer version looks better but doubt that the use of Gimp comes close to what you can do with APh. I do not want to davalue Gimp. I just thing it is still very different to Affinity.

d.