I think Krita is a more viable competitor to Photoshop than Gimp at this point… It’s also great for pen tablet drawing and arguably superior in that category.

Absolutely agree it's there for artists. Krita is a very successful project and I hear mainstream artists talk about it often, while not being an artist myself. Well, technically I own a Cintiq...

I haven't been able to get it to work well with PSDs, though, and I find the interface clunky for the sort of image editing I'm doing. I find GIMP easy enough to use, but it unfortunately lacks some crucial features. 3.0 is right around the corner (for real this time), so I'm hopeful. Unfortunately, PSD is a must because of collaboration. GIMP's ingest of PSD is better. But Krita does have non-destructive effects.

What I'm really hoping for is Affinity Photo to work well in Wine. Most people can get it running now but I think it's a little buggy or lacking in performance. I'll have to give that a shot soon.

But yeah, video editors are lacking. Kden live is ok (and awesome for the price)

As it so happens, I've thought about this a lot.

Kdenlive is definitely the best free software option but the lack of hardware accelerated playback really kills it dead in the water for me. I'm hoping it will improve soon, given the success of the fundraiser. DaVinci Resolve is fantastic but needing to transcode footage if you have H.264/AAC source footage (geh, I know, but some of us do) and being stuck with H.264 hardware encode in the best-case scenario is not great. I found Lightworks was the best option in terms of professional features + workflow. Proprietary, but hey, at least it works really well on Linux.

Audio editors are behind too. Audacity is pretty good for 2 track. Bitwig is a great multitrack alternative to Ableton… But Ardour isn’t developed enough for a pro studio and I’ve never seen one that uses Linux. Part of this is poor support for vst plugins developed for Windows, mostly due to their copy protection.

That's a shame to hear! I don't work with audio on a very professional level, so Audacity is fine for my use cases. It's improved in a significant way since the Muse Group acquisition (mainly non-destructive editing, but plenty of other stuff). I'm also annoyed but unsurprised to hear that DRM has thwarted compatibility yet again.