You can also use weechat as a bouncer, and it works even better with its own clients which can sync chat history rather than receiving it in a dump. The android client is fantastic in that respect.
The plugin ecosystem is also great. I have a plugin that pushes notifications for PMs and mentions to my gotify server, alerting me on my phone without having to drain its batteries staying connected.
I’ve been using gimp’s 3.x branch since 2016 or so (after getting a hidpi display) and gimp itself since the early 2000s, both for personal stuff and for work. I’m typically editing existing photos and images to clean them up, apply effects, make new clean images from pieces of existing ones, etc, and for my uses it’s great. Also, having been using it for so long, I actually really prefer the ux to Photoshop (especially since they added an option to use it in single window mode).
I’ve seen videos showing some of the features it’s missing for certain types of things though, and while there are hacky scripted ways to emulate them, you might find it lacking if you’re expecting those particular features.
I’d recommend looking up tutorials on YouTube for things you frequently do and see how much work it is and what the final product looks like. You could up the playback speed to save time since you won’t be following along with gimp yourself.