RAW conversion

[Ofnuts]

There are plenty of good and free demosaicing apps around. I use RawTherapee (despite its somewhat exotic UI), but there are others (Darktable, Photozone, Nufraw). Some of these can be installed a a Gimp plugin to open a RAW directly in Gimp.

Personal opinion:

• When you use RAW it is normally because you want to do processing from the sensor data, without incurring the data loss of the JPEG (in particular you want to keep the dynamic).
  
• Therefore you'll spend time in the raw processor, and you will want to save the outcome of that processing
  
• You may even want to save different outcomes
  
• You may even want to try different things with different demosaicing apps
  
• So doing the raw processing in a separate app, saving the result as a high quality image (16-bit TIFF for instance) that you can use as a starting point for different Gimp edits makes a lot more sense than using the app as a plugin.