Linux

I can recommend PhotoGIMP which makes GIMP UI fairly close to Ps.

The first item on your list should have been to try Gimp ?

GIMP and Krita are aimed at Photoshop, while RawTherapee and Darktable are aimed at Lightroom, and Inkscape is aimed at Illustrator.

I just use gimp, but for the record, someone recently got modern Photoshop working in wine

Well, for image manipulation, I can only think of GIMP as I have been using it for close to 2 decades. But because I have barely scratched the surface of what you can do with it, I don't know if it would be a suitable replacement for your use-case. Also of note, its UI is definitely not a one-to-one reproduction of Photoshop's, so it will require some getting used to.

https://www.photopea.com/

It's Photoshop CS2 in your browser

As someone already pointed out, try to increase font size first.

I personally use a Vector layer and put text there (not sure if it even works in paint layer). For making it bigger you can then just grab the corner with Select Shapes Tool and resize it. If it doesn't work, enable Scale Styles in the Tool Options docker.

Photo editing: darktable
Digital Art: Krita
Illustrator type stuff: Inkscape

Pain: Gimp. although the PhotoGIMP plugin makes it bearable.

OR wait for the recent wine patch to mature a bit more and then you can literally just use Photoshop.

There are ways to bypass some of the issues. But for me, what works the best, is to get used to use the tool that fits the job best, and sometimes that's two or three tools for the same project. It's exactly if I do some woodwork (carpenter work), I might use both a saw, a hammer, a chisel, a drill and a screwdriver... It really doesn't bother me, to use more apps to create something I'm satisfied with. :-)

Inkscape, Gimp, Krita is my most used apps on Linux... :-) On SloWindows it's mostly Inkscape and Affinity...

Since no one else has said it... Pixelorama is somewhat focused on making pixel art and animations, but it's great at what it does.

Do people still like https://www.photopea.com/ ?

Pinta is pretty decent for some things, like a paint.net for Linux.

GIMP, but you definitely should install also the GMIC and resynthesiser plugins. With GMIC especially, you're getting so many things that not even Photoshop can do, making GIMP objectively superior.

Edit: If you mean you're looking for a raw editor, meaning you change the colors and how the image themselves look, then you need Darktable. This is a raw editor. GIMP is mainly for VFX.

Krita is what I use but I also find text handling difficult so I always do text last.

Personally I use GIMP. Been my photoshop replacement for at least a good 5ish years now, and it's come a long way! It has (imo) a pretty intuitive interface so it doesn't take too long to acclimate.

Affinity

Someone just recently managed to get it going.

I started using Krita, which is amazing and does lots of things I do, but the text editor when I try to resize text, it just ruins it and gets blurry sometimes. Then I found inkscape, which was good for, text and everything else worked fine, but not much of photo editor.

Inkscape is like Adobe illustrator. It's for vector graphics and text. it's not great for photos/pictures/pixelated things. Like, you can add those as objects to a document. But you want to edit the images somewhere else. Maybe a krita --> inkscape workflow could work for you?

I also use kdenlive for video editing, and rawtherapee for DSLR photos editing.

If you're also just kinda exploring software for fun, I recommend trying to play around with blender for more specialized video editing. Like, if you want to add complex effects, or motion track/stabilize, whatever. It's an extremely powerful piece of software (best to look at tutorials, idk if anyone can figure that shit out on their own). All I've done with it is stabilize some video (which I then used in a kdenlive project), and I absolutely haven't even scratched the surface.

What are you doing with photoshop? If it's mostly photo editing, it's darktable that you're looking for.

From what I know you'll have to compose with a mix of Krita GIMP and Inkscape because those are the three most reliable and feature rich FOSS image editors at this time. In the current capitalist mode of production, free software will hardly be on the level of paid software, however enshittified, because of how many devs get to work full time on it.

Keep in mind that I say this while operating fully on a FOSS environment, because the relative increase in features and reliability doesn't justify going from free to an absurdly high subscription

Gimp and Darktable should do the trick !

the text editor when I try to resize text, it just ruins it and gets blurry sometimes.

I dunno what you're doing but... When you resize text, you usually want to select the text and increase the font size. Sometimes you can render to vector and resize that. But if you resize the text as pixels, then it'll probably look bad. Generally I try not to render text to pixels or do that last if necessary.

I know you said "alternatives to Photoshop" but if you don't find any, this video shows that you can run Photoshop on Linux now. Try it and see if it works for you

Ive never used it so I cant vest for its quality but I have heard Photopea as an alternative for Photoshop in the past. It being webbased shohld also mean that it will work well on linux