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.
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.
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 :)