Biting the bullet and giving GIMP a chance

January 8th, 2026, 4:17 PM

I love Photopea, but lately it's been giving me some issues. I long yearned for a reliable and free Linux alterative to Photoshop and I refused to use GIMP after a bad experience with it back when I still used Windows. But it would appear as though GIMP is my only option.

To make the transition easier, I found a plugin called "PhotoGimp", which changes the UI and some settings to be more like Photoshop. I had already tried GIMP once before (in 2017?) and had to look up how to do the most basic of things because the UI is/was so clunky and unclear.

Even after installing the plugin, I didn't enjoy my time with GIMP.

One (of many) issues I had was when I imported a JPG image into GIMP with the intention of deleting the white background. Seems simple enough. Magic Wand, Select, Delete! ... Delete! Delete! "Why isn't it deleting?", I thought.

I thougt it did delete and I just couldn't see it because of some weird default setting. But then I looked it up and saw that I had add an alpha channel first. Okay? In Photopea and Krita, I could just select, delete and be done with it.

I later found that "Add an Alpha Channel" is not turned on by default in GIMP. I don't know why.

This program is going to take a lot of getting used to.