I feel you.
I recommend checking photopea.com, it’s a very light photoshop webversion that can do almost everything photoshop can do, a very cool tool.

As a life-long pirate, having full MS Office, Macromedia and Adobe packages weren’t ever a problem, but one day I decided to start using FOSS stuff… and man, getting into GIMP was damn painful, oh, the horror!
I’m very glad for photopea.com when I need to do some quick stuff, but for GIMP, this guy here made a very cool setup to help us Photoshop users https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

Oops, I forgot to mention the OS, it’s Win11 (I edited the main post now).

thanks, going to try it :)

I’m also in no way qualified to check code, so I just trust that if something has a lot of forks it means a lot of people are looking at it.

I saw that Notepad and Paint have integrated AI now. I didn’t check if the same applies to Calculator, but I’m terribly afraid they might collect my Calculator history… far more shameful than any late‑night browsing history.

Thanks. I tested a few and so far I favor PicView (haven’t tested ImageGlass yet). A lot of people recommend nomacs, I find it kind of weird because it technically doesn’t even support Win11 since its last update was 2020, before Win11’s release (Win11 isn’t even listed on its site). I wonder if there haven’t been any codec updates since then for nomacs to still rank so high.

PicView looking great! Thanks for the recommendation :)

For viewing? :S I tried it for batch conversion and I was very disappointed it somehow skipped files on big batches, but I didn’t find a way to view images with it - I mean, trying to open an image with its .exe does nothing.