[Zambyte]

Unless you need compatibility with Adobe file formats, Free editing software works fine too. I've been using Darktable for about a decade. People bash on GIMP for not being able to do what Photoshop can, but it's because GIMP is built with the intent of being extended by the user. It can be extended to do what people complain that it cannot do. Kdenlive is good at filling the needs met by Premiere. I think the hardest Adobe application for me to recommend a portable alternative to is After Effects. Maybe Blender can be coaxed into filling some AE uses.

[CWuestefeld]

I strongly disagree. Have you used Lightroom in the last, say, two years?

They've had a revolutionary upgrade in their masking tools. ML models power automated, smart mask creation. For example, on a landscape photo I can get, with just a couple of clicks, separate masks for sky, water, land, foliage, structures, and natural ground. The power that this gives me to edit my photos is amazing. To the best of my knowledge, Darktable and others have nothing approaching this.

[miladyincontrol]

By large agree, the most recent years in lightroom have been some of it's most transformational. A lot of tasks that used to require going into PS have been borderline automated. Their more recent denoise methods as well have been nothing short of excellent.

Not that its perfect when 100% automated but it takes a fraction the time to adjust things towards perfection, no one misses doing it by hand.

Rapidraw does try to compete some having ML based masking but I gotta agree most the open source solutions have been lagging behind bigtime.

[tracker1]

Users of creative apps are rarely also programmers capable of creating the extensions you mention. If the goal is getting people to switch to your application, open source or not, you need to provide a level of minimal functionality. What is minimal functionality varies from person to person and may include the way you interact with said functionality.

While Gimp and Krita are very useful and even usable for a lot of people... that doesn't mean it's a suitable replacement for the Adobe products. Some will get Affinity running with Wine... frankly it would be nice if there was an "easy gutton" to doing a lot of this. I'm not sure about the legalities of copying actual MS dll's from Windows for use with Wine even... even if yoou have a license, as I'm not a lawyer, which can impact the ability to make it easier to do/use.

It would be nice if more software at least got tested to run on Wine/Proton with closer to first party support. Bridging the gap between a full Linux version, and something that can at least run in Linux.