I suppose Krita[0] might be one of the most interesting alternatives. But Krita is more optimised for drawing with a tablet than anything else. Someone who uses Krita a lot has pointed out to me that Krita isn't as good at text handling as GIMP is, for instance.

[0] https://krita.org/en/

> Krita isn't as good at text handling as GIMP is

It must be very, very bad at text handling then.

I believe text handling is one target of this years kickstarter campaign

Krita might be of interest to you as they try to increasingly unite vector drawing (SVG basd) with pixel art.

http://www.peppercarrot.com/de/article265/svg-experimentatio...

I've been using Inkscape for years, but not GIMP.

Pinta Image Editor (open source for Linux, BSD, Mac, Windows) finally works reasonably well as an alternative. For years, Pinta crashed resizing an image larger than the screen, and did annoying things like adding the markers from a selection area to the image itself. Those bugs were finally fixed this year. It doesn't have as many bells and whistles as Photoshop or GIMP, but the user interface is entirely graphical and straightforward.

You'll have to compare yourself, but http://alternativeto.net/software/gimp/?license=opensource&p...