1. LTSC + WSL (Better than VM)
2. Dual Boot
3. Linux only

To me Adobe has very bad UI, I did try to use it, and first time was awful. Freehand was a lot more intuitive, but when Macromedia was bought, was killed.

I get, that a lot of people did learn to use Adobe UI, and of course they want the same because they’re used to, but doesn’t make it better.

Affinity is more friendlier that PS to me.

I’m not saying that GIMP UI is perfect or good, but right now, to my casual use case, is not bad. Obviously can be better, and get some ideas from other UIs.

I prefer:

• ImagePipe: fast edit
• Snapseed: complex edit (not FOSS)
• Aves: gallery
• Superimage: AI upscaler (RealESRGAN)
• Waifu2x NCNN: AI upscaler (Waifu2x, RealCuGAN)

With ChaiNNer you can remove background, upscale (local), it’s a lot more flexible and compatible with models than Upscayl, also a little bit more complex (node based, not as complex as comfyUI). You can upscale an image with a face model and use other model for everything else in the same image.

Use Termux, you need:

• Android Tablet/Smartphone.
• Bluetooth keyboard.
• Cheap stand 4 device.

That’s my setup to play tabletop rpg (DND5E) for a couple of years, all CLI using any text editor you like with markdown. I use: tmux, vis.

In your case: SC-IM, visidata, any text editor.

With Termux you can use packages from repo or from other distros with proot-distro, like: Alpine, Avoid, Debian, Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu.

• ChaiNNer: is very flexible and can do all of that. Node based.
• Upscayl: do only upscales with less models, but has simpler UI, very fast in AMD GPU (because NCNN).

• I haven’t tried automatic1111 or ComfyUI yet.
• All of them work offline withou limits and are more flexible than online alternatives.

GIMP has:

• OpenVINO.
• stable-gimpfusion
• gimp-stable-boy