GIMP takes some time getting used to, but it's reliable, it will stick around and having used it for the past 20 years, I have issues switching to something else.

There’s Krita…

https://krita.org/en/

Krita is so good, and so easy to use! I rarely use gimp now

> I'm looking for a simple editor that can do color adjustments, crop/resize images, and add text.

Those are all pretty simple in GIMP though? I'm not doubting that they are different from Photoshop but how long could it take to learn the GIMP way?

I'd like to know more about color adjustments. I know GIMP can do them in some form, but I have no idea what the options are or what kind of results I should hope to be able to achieve. Documentation doesn't really seem to address these questions, though it is available if your question is "how do I run this menu item I found?" (Answer: open the menu, and click on the menu item.)

Cropping and resizing are trivial. It would take less than one minute to learn how.

There's a Colors menu in Gimp 3. But it's destructive and only for the selected layer, not the special layer type you get in Photoshop.

You can use the gmic plugin alongside with Gimp, and adjust the CMYK values. I use that all the time. Color adjustments like yellow -> orange, or green -> purple, might exceed your expectations. Photoshop is excellent at it as well, i have never used Photoshop to compare though.

For more professional work Clut (Color Look Up Table) is supported by gmic as well.

I also made my own open source tool to pass gmic filters to whole videos, see an example here [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8of-R-5zcs

The biggest issue I had migrating as a Photoshop user since 1996 was the key bindings. But using the config files people shared online sorted that.

I'm not going to link to a specific one implying I'm recommending it, but a web search will show multiple.

One important gimp note is if you don't have 3.0+ already, get it. It finally has non-destructive editing, which is the main reason I had to keep using ps for for a long time.

> The biggest issue I had migrating as a Photoshop user since 1996 was the key bindings

RIP GIMPshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop

PhotoGIMP is the current thing like that I think?

Neat: https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

It's easy to change keybindings on Gimp, most of mines are ones i used in photoshop 4-CS2.

>It finally has non-destructive editing

not for the fonts unfortunately, if you resize a text with the scale tool, it gets rasterized

I use Paint.net for simple tasks like those you listed. I paid $10 for it in the Microsoft store but I think you can get it for free from the website.

Paint.net isn't free software, it's proprietary freeware. It used to be free a long time ago, but the author is a tool and made it closed source because people were creating other versions of it.

Pinta is a free reimplenetation: https://www.pinta-project.com

For simple things, I use mtPaint on Linux and PhotoFiltre on Windows. They are easy to figure out and very stable.

Paint.Net on Windows. Though on Windows there is Paint, that is less capable, but still no equivalent is on MacOS OOTB. (Also the drama around Paint is worth its own bashing).

I'd be interested in a similar basic tool as paint for mac and Linux (and possibly also for windows, if MS crappifies Paint, after it has tried to kill it earlier)

Pinta (essentially a reimplementation of Paint.NET) exists for MacOS as well as Linux and Windows: https://www.pinta-project.com/releases/

There are some subtle quirks where pinta just doesn’t play ball in a way that is intuitive to a PDN aficionado.

Photopea is very close but i keep coming back to PDN either VM or RDP

I want to like Pinta, but some of the load/save behaviors are just weird... not sure if I last tried the Flatpak version or not, but I've tried it on both Mac and Linux a few times... It's my go to for quick edits, but far from a fav.

I tried Pinta, and honestly it has so many subtle differences from PDN, it was really uncomfortable and unproductive for me. I could not get to like it, but will give it some more time.

Also the icons are terrible (at least on the mac), I find it really hard to identify a tool, these monochrome icons set me off and slowed me down since Visual Studio 2012. This fad is a really good example for design trends ruining productivity.

I use Photopea which tries to mimic Photoshop UI and runs entirely on your browser. In fact, you can even install it as a Web App to run it offline. Pretty intuitive UI.

https://www.photopea.com/

Yeah, but Photopea has a monthly cost and this post is about avoiding that. I love pwa, but I need image editing maybe once a month, I'm not going to pay a subscription for that