You made me chuckle! I was raised on open source by a software engineer. I was using gimp on Ubuntu when I was 7 or 8 years old. I understand your sentiment completely, but you need to understand that time is money, and if something like layer blending takes even a few more clicks in gimp than photoshop, it is not ready to compete. Of course, you can think whatever you want about software you don’t rely on for a living. The rest of the world will smile and move on with reality.

This is definitely the take of someone who doesn’t need the full capabilities of such tools to make a living.

really buggy on fedora kinoite

They added native tiling a while back! I am running debian 12 with plasma 5.27 and it is super comfortable.

Tiling is built into plasma after late versions of 5. You can hit super+T to change default layout, shift+drag window to snap to layout, and set custom keybinds for keybord navigation. There might be default settings but I set mine to mimic i3 of the bat so I couldnt tell you what they are…

Plasma has such a good tiling window manager now as well, with one of the most low resource draw frameworks powering it. But it isn’t cool and hip I guess!