Can anyone recommend a simple and noob/nonprofessional-friendly cross-platform app for simple graphic design and photography uses?
I normally recommend GIMP for this but for some people who I help with their projects it’s overkill and not worth learning for infrequent use.
What can I recommend/teach such people to use, which is more stripped back?
Common use cases are putting together basic flyers & ads, restaurant menus, cropping photos etc.
As you’re dealing with digital print output, Scribus may be a good option. That’s layout (something of a mix of Illustrator and InDesign), not image editing, but cropping photos is easily done in a variety of FOSS without having to be subjected to the learning curve of GIMP (so long as your RIP can translate RGB into CMYK, which was a solved problem in the aughts). I’ve admittedly only played around with Scribus a bit, but from what I can tell from your use cases, you’re not looking for the bells and whistles like trapping one needs for offset.
Yeah, Scribus has come up a lot when I’ve been looking into FOSS & Linux printing workflows. I will give it a proper look! Thanks :)
Ive tried Scribus, and found the interface very hard to get used to. For folks coming from Adobe, I find Inkscape the easiest for design. I would use a separate program for cropping, I don’t have a great recommendation for that.