While I share your appreciation of Krita and FOSS in general (long live Gimp and Inkscape), I have to point out that there are good commercial software that are not a total subscription rip-off (I'm looking at you Adobe). Here are some I know of and have used (bugs and limitations and everything):
- The Affinity suite
- Corel Painter
and perhaps a few others. They do their job of paying their developers, cultivating artist communities, doing R&D and pricing their products at something reasonable for the average artist.
Yeah, I picked up Affinity a few years back and haven't regretted it. I don't do graphics work enough to justify a subscription. Affinity's products hit a good price sweet spot of being affordable, and they're well supported.
I actually ended up more heavily switching to Krita though, just because I could install it on machines that weren't "mine" without worrying about the license, and it was enough for my purposes in most cases.
I also love Acorn on the Mac. It’s not as advanced as Photoshop, but I can do my layers, “curves”, selections, masks, etc. And I find the UI easier to manage than GIMP. I think it’s about $30 and you have to pay for major upgrades. I’ve paid twice I think in maybe 5 or 10 years.
Yeah the Affinity programs completely cover everything I used to do with the Adobe Suite. I'm not a professional designer but I often have to do small photo editing / vector design tasks and Adobe always felt like such a rip-off, especially once they switched to their subscription model. Very happy there is some competition in this space.
Corel painter has terrible UX, to the point where I deleted it from my computer after three hours attempting to follow tutorials. On Mac, I strongly recommend Pixelmator.
- The Affinity suite
- Corel Painter
and perhaps a few others. They do their job of paying their developers, cultivating artist communities, doing R&D and pricing their products at something reasonable for the average artist.