I’m as big a Linux fan as anyone (says he typing this on a Clevo Laptop running Fedora 31) but, to be fair, the GIMP is not “a Photoshop alternative” - it is barely a Paintshop Pro alternative.
My wife finds Gimp a perfectly suitable replacement for Photoshop - that said, she often remarks how opensource software does not generally make people, who are used to other brand name products, excited and even willing to use the opensource alternative, simply due to unintuitive UIs or functions that were easily found in the brand software and are hidden in an obscure menu or require multiple steps to achieve a similar result. It is the bane of opensource software development that it tends not to be user focussed to getting things done, but rather developer-centric (I have an itch, so I’ll scratch it).
I would add that she finds online software often easier and quicker to use (quick and dirty), irrespective of the personal information she is giving away to whichever operation is taking her private information. Trade-off of privacy against functionality.
Risking ‘forking’ this subject, perhaps, I wondered what you guys think of this…
I’ve been completely open source on pc/laptop for years - but would also like to escape Microsoft/Apple/Google on my phone…
Bit like “going off grid” I guess Geof 
In the modern world can you entirely bin useful apps from the Google stable?
How long will it take you to design, build and implement something like Google Calendar, Sheets and Keep which help (me) enormously in organising my life…
I had an Ubuntu (Meizu MX4) phone for a while - it worked, but it came with a very limited number of apps, the app store was virtually inexistent, and what apps were available were generally just web frontends…needless to say, it didn’t quite meet my business use case (I’m not social media butterfly to any great extent).
I am interested in the PinePhone, and have also seen the FairPhone, but I would also like my phone to actually be useful…so far, that has always been a sticking point. For example, I was reading that the PinePhone has a paltry battery life of 5 hours, not really what one could call useful in today’s terms.
Yes I looked hard at Ubuntu Touch, but concluded it wasn’t quite there yet.
I am a bit of an ‘off-gridder’ but to be honest my main motivation is that I just find these giant American corporations annoying, more in areas like design, adverts, etc, than the usual privacy concerns.
The 3 apps I mentioned don’t seem to be bedraggled by ads…
I don’t know those apps Graham, so I was talking more generally. it has to be admitted, I think, that Google do a lot of things pretty well - though I have been told it’s not because their algorithms are better, just that they have more data - for example Google Maps is far better than my satnav, and Google Translate is getting really impressive now - but it’s easy to see this comes down to simply having more data than competitors.
And of course - Google runs on Linux!
I would add “yet” to that. The free version of Gmail has slowly gained more and more ads. Fortunately at least, for the time being, Google filters them out into a separate tab, but they come uninvited nonetheless.
I have a business account with Google (Suite for Business), which is fortunately absent of such intrusions.
As an alternative to these offerings, has anyone tried Nextcloud to any extent ? Am thinking of spinning up an instance to give it a go, perhaps with Collabora Office as the office productivity suite.
There are a lot of apps that you can download without needing to go through google play. There is even an alternative app downloading site that you can get most things (or alternatives) from. It really depends on how much you care about your privacy. Hubby does some thing to our phones so they are running off an open source OS (sorry can’t remember what it is called).
Then they are probably quite happy they are getting enough with just nicking your personal details / contacts etc. 
If they really want to know how many times I go to the toilet and the quantity produced each time from Google sheets they are welcome to it 
Grist to the mill of Google data processing 
I have Nextcloud running on a Raspberry Pi 4B (4GB), with its own domain name, so accessible for us also from the outside. Works well with our 2 laptops (Linux Mint), 1 iMac, 2 iPads, 2 Android smartphones,
It has replaced Dropbox, Google Drive etc. and other syncing software for us. Low cost but functional and with good performance. See https://ownyourbits.com/nextcloudpi
I have installed /e/ on my old Wileyfox Swift smartphone, of curiosity and for testing. This is just my backup phone, without SIM card. Freephone 3 with /e/ could very well be the replacement for my Nokia 6.1 when its time arrives.
My old WD MyBookLive NAS has died a death and now looking for a replacement NAS in our home network consisting of 2 x Ubuntu PCs and 2 x iPad + 1 windoze XP laptop (for old times sake).
I have been considering replacing the WD with this beast as it works well with Linux - the WD MyCloud offering doesn’t support the Linux platform.
My NAS is a Asustor AS3202, serving as backup destination for the above mentioned Nextcloud server and for our office iMac’s TimeMachine. It is also our Plex multimedia server.
In general, Synology is a good brand together with QNAP.
Personally, if I would now setup a NAS, I would “build” it myself with a Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB with two USB disks. But that’s me, liking the Raspberry Pi and all the things you can do with it.