I thought the same about Gimp, until I sat down and tried to learn it's workflows. Once you adjust, it's pretty great. imo, ymmv, obviously.

2.5 hours of battery is a serious gaping hole imo.

Year of the Linux desktop perhaps; Year of the Linux laptop perhaps not..

2.5h of battery life is absolutely not typical though. Linux on laptops is often fine.

Picking hardware with good support helps a lot. I would expect system76 to be a safe bet though (but I haven't tried their hardware).

I removed the batteries in our laptops because we use them like desktops all the time and it's one less fire hazard to worry about.

I guess it works out for you but I’d be inconvenienced for not being able to move around and paranoid that I may jerk the wire powering the machine. Still glad you were able to find a solution for your setup though.

Even if you are plugged all the time you may want batteries as it prevents crashes when power is cut off or the cable randomly disconnects (especially with USB-C that can easily happen as it's designed to disconnect easily). It's not that file system of today are immune to stability issues when power randomly cuts off not to mention losing your work/state. Batteries are like UPS for a desktop computer.

Depending on what you are doing, if you don't fancy Gimp, then maybe one of: Krita, Darktable, Inkscape?

Have you tried running Affinity products via Wine? I've heard good things. I personally ditched Adobe years ago for Affinity on Windows & Mac. Only people I know still using Adobe for photo or vector work at a company that doesn't blink at paying for it.

Have you tried Photoshop's online version that runs in a Web browser?

(it uses wasm)

So? It is still a pretty popular and useful piece of software even if your circle doesn't use it.

One of the big barriers to having more people use Linux is having the software packages they use to actually do work available on the platform. Image editing is the most popular software type that isn't really available on Linux with an equivalent to the commercial package that everyone uses.

The point is that if of the hundreds or thousands of people I know don't use it then it seems mathematically provable that the largest majority of people don't use them either and so it's not a strong argument against Linux becoming the standard OS which is what is happening now regardless how much some people don't want it do happen.

gimp is actually pretty good, but things are in different places than photoshop and that's a huge change.