askchapo

In GIMP do:

Text to path (right click on the text layer to find this)

Path to selection (switch from the layer tab to the path tab and right click on the path to find this)

Select -> Grow (to taste, start with 3-5px)

Select -> Feather (optional, to taste, start with 2-3px)

Create an alpha layer under the text and use the Paint bucket (or just drag the swatch onto the image)

For memes, it might be worth fucking with Inkscape. You can import raster images then add text with a lot of control over stroke / fill / scaling. If you need to do photo touch-up, then you'll need a raster image editor. Krita might be worth looking at if you absolutely can't stand GIMP.

Photopea.com

Simply incredible. I don't know why it's free or how Adobe hasn't sued them out of existence.

I used to use paint.net quite a bit in the past, it kinda fell by the wayside tho

Gimp is super capable, it just thinks differently than some image editors. Mostly because its a picture editor first, and a drawing/creation program second. Once you get used to it, know where the tricks are, and set up presets for the effects/dropshadows/text you use for memes, it's just as quick as any other though.

If I just need to make a normal 2009-level Impact font meme though, I honestly just use ImgFlip. It's the easiest and it works on my phone too.

I always used Phonto on my phone when I had a meme page. it was really easy to use and it ran on my shitty phones so most people could probably run it.

I've made several hundred memes using Inkscape, personally, although I know that memes are kind of an odd use of a vector editor like that. There are some types of edits that are a lot harder to do in Inkscape compared to a raster image editor, but for my purposes, Inkscape is the way to go.

Getpaint.net

It's free and light and it can do layers

I like inkscape.

Another alternative is Krita. It's comparable to both Photoshop and GIMP, but it's focused more on drawing rather than editing. It's also open source like GIMP.