The GIMP is an excellent imaging program which for most people covers around 80% of what Photoshop does and its FREE. For OFFICE you can use WPS Office for Linux which is free and far better than IMO Libreoffice and is pretty compatible with Ms Office.
The only people that claim The GIMP is an excellent imaging program are people that do not regularly use imaging programs to any great degree. It's complex, horrific user interface is badly designed and it simply lacks too many features to be usable by anyone other than amateurs, which is ironic because its interface is so bad that only a professional would be committed enough to learn it.
Sorry I totally disagree with this.
IMO,
Adobe products have the worst GUIs of any programs I've used (even the awful "Ribbon" is superior).
For example you can't even:
- View all of the tools in PS (only two columns).
- Specify an exact location and size for cropping.
The only Adobe program (with that GUI) that I find easy to use, is Flash.
I was reading a comment from someone (on another site) ranting about how bad the W8 series GUI was.
He finished his rant by stating that he helped design the CS6 GUI, which (IMO) totally destroyed his credibility.
But oh well. I'm not a huge Photoshop fan either, but PS is the defacto standard. If you have to have a terrible user interface, at least have the features you need. Gimp just gives you all the pain with none of the gain. There are a multitude of very capable third party photo, graphics, and structured drawing programs for Windows.. some of which exist for Linux as well, usually in some ancient version.
I generally don't work with photographs (only drawings and screenshots).
The only things that PS has going for it, are:
- Its advanced plugins/tools (especially photo tools)
- A lot of tutorials available for it
Unless I need some special Adobe feature (i.e. convert to Smart Object) I always use GIMP.
GIMP starts a lot faster and (IMO) the basic functions (selections, masks, cropping) are easier to use.
I will concede that if I'd used PS for the last 8 years, I'd probably think that GIMP was awful too.