Is there any way to get these going relatively painlessly?
I’ve tried working with GPU-passthrough into a Windows VM which doesn’t work all that well with my laptop setup (nvidia-AMD hybrid laptop).
Looking up other methods, seems like most of them rely on outdated versions of adobe software. I’d like to get something relatively new running
<rant> Honestly, and I don’t mean this to hate on either software as I used both a lot before I discovered piracy on Windows: the quality of GIMP and Inkscape is well below most competing FOSS projects, let alone their proprietary challengers.
GIMP is powerful, but might as well be declared abandoned with how they’ve been preparing to port it to GTK 3 for a decade. It has some great features being held back by poor hardware acceleration and falling behind features provided even by alternatives like Photopea. It’s the X11 of photo editors.
Inkscape is okay, but the workflow stinks. BoxySVG is comparatively much more intuitive if it wasn’t lacking in a bunch of features. Inkscape has also basically been abandoned imo, with the project still not managing to get Apple M1 support working on the latest MacOS for nearly a year.
The barrier to contribute to either project is also sky-high imo, with their insistence on using C for cross=platform, front end applications. Normally this wouldn’t be a massive deal but it’s one of the key reasons I think Photopea and other proprietary freeware apps are running circles on these two projects - The turnaround for features and UX is so much better with modern languages. </rant>