Again, just my opinion, but I prefer Krita to any FLOSS alternative. I've been designing professionally for over a decade, using Adobe for most of it; Krita is my preferred FLOSS tool for photo editing, and I've tried them all.
I'm surprised, I never managed to use it efficiently for that purpose. Perhaps AffinityPhoto spoiled me a bit. I love Krita for illustration work though, nothing compares... As far as commercial alternatives go, I haven't tried Clip Paint although everybody praises it- but I don't really feel the need to. Apparently it's excellent?
Yea, the workflow is a bit different. Not having a concept of fill opacity as separate from layer opacity forced me to change the way I do certain things, and having certain retouching tools grouped with the brushes was confusing at first.
For years, I didn't use anything besides Adobe CC, because it's "industry standard," so I've never given anything like Affinity a go in earnest.
With all FLOSS design tools, I had to have a bit of a reckoning with myself; like most people, at first I thought they were unintuitive, until I was able to have a bit of objectivity and found that most of the issues I had with them didn't arise because they were unintuitive; it was just because they didn't work like Adobe tools, which are themselves complex tools that you really can't just pick up on your own without some degree of instruction.
If you're talking about general ergonomy (as opposed to functionality), you may find Affinity Photo to be a breath of fresh air. It's close to Ps (on purpose) but it is so much better thought out, the way you interact with your documents. Really worth trying
I’ve had a pretty good experience using photopea as a photoshop replacement. Definitely not quite as powerful, but it has more than enough features for your average user
My camera supports 10 bit/channel color. My monitor does too. GIMP only supports sRGB, so 8-bit color. It's unsuitable for editing, and even worse for printing.