Krita is basically (one of the) best in class applications for digital sketching/painting specifically. But it's not really a replacement for photo editing or graphic design.

I hear this criticism a lot, but it's simply not true. What doesn't help is what people mean by "photos" or "photo editing".

RAW Photo import and editing is currently limited in Krita, and you cannot export RAW formats. But even professionals tend not to use destructive layer based editors like gimp/krita/photoshop/painter/paintshop pro etc and are instead using dedicated software like lightroom, rawtherapee and darkroom.

But if your output format is not RAW, then you have more than enough to edit "photos".

You have layers, masking, vectors and spatial bitmap editors. That's all any of these editors workflows have been since the 90's. Anything else is extra.

Put me in front of Photoshop on modern mac or IFX Amazon Paint on Irix and my workflow and (sloppy) output would be the same.

I didn't say you couldn't edit photos in Krita, just that it wasn't best in class for that use case. Probably because it isn't really a primary goal of the project.

It's less about what features are technically supported and more about what workfkows the ux is built around, at least for me.

I am just an amateur though, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

Seconding (or thirding) Affinity! I switched last year and apart from some functionality about charts and graphs, I am not looking back at all.

Yup Affinity and OS are great unless you have very specific needs.

While Krita can be nice, it can also be a bit difficult and bothersome to use.

For example, there is no printing support. Units everywhere (other than document creation) are in pixels and cannot be changed to millimeters, etc. Tools (like drawing a rectangle) operate on the current layer instead of creating a new one like Photoshop, which makes drawing annoying. Guides aren’t that fantastic to use. There’s a lot of areas that require polish in Krita.

Why would you prefer drawing in a new layer when switching tools?

Because quite often I would like to move or resize an object (and only that object) after drawing it. Note I'm really only talking about drawing shapes, etc, using the standard tools. Not really brush strokes.

I see, thanks.

Curious... why not Photopea as it is handpicked by sites like https://alternativeshub.gitlab.io/graphic-design/ ?