Hello fediverse penguins!
Being in Linux for 2+ years, I have found alternative solutions for the apps I used on windows. But I can’t find something like Photoshop.
I started using Krita, which is amazing and does lots of things I do, but the text editor when I try to resize text, it just ruins it and gets blurry sometimes. Then I found inkscape, which was good for, text and everything else worked fine, but not much of photo editor.
So what next? any recommendations ?
I also use kdenlive for video editing, and rawtherapee for DSLR photos editing.
I can recommend PhotoGIMP which makes GIMP UI fairly close to Ps.
The first item on your list should have been to try Gimp ?
I’ll add that you can’t just “try” gimp really, you’ll have to learn some new workflows for sure, but yeah, should’ve been top of the list, it’s THE alternative.
There are ways to bypass some of the issues. But for me, what works the best, is to get used to use the tool that fits the job best, and sometimes that’s two or three tools for the same project. It’s exactly if I do some woodwork (carpenter work), I might use both a saw, a hammer, a chisel, a drill and a screwdriver… It really doesn’t bother me, to use more apps to create something I’m satisfied with. :-)
Inkscape, Gimp, Krita is my most used apps on Linux… :-) On SloWindows it’s mostly Inkscape and Affinity…
I just use gimp, but for the record, someone recently got modern Photoshop working in wine
As someone already pointed out, try to increase font size first.
I personally use a Vector layer and put text there (not sure if it even works in paint layer). For making it bigger you can then just grab the corner with Select Shapes Tool and resize it. If it doesn’t work, enable Scale Styles in the Tool Options docker.
GIMP and Krita are aimed at Photoshop, while RawTherapee and Darktable are aimed at Lightroom, and Inkscape is aimed at Illustrator.
Krita is aimed at Clip Studio Paint. It’s not great for quickly editing something.
But their hands are shaking too much, so they aim, but at the wrong things. I wish any of them could find some UX designers. I forgot about the text editing in Krita, that was horrible indeed.
I like the UI of Krita. Gimp is… Uh… Gimp. But Krita is certainly a modern drawing program.
Gimp’s latest version is much cleaner and a way smoother experience. I’m actually really excited about it. :)
Totally agreed on Krita. It’s a joy to use. My drawing and painting could certainly be better, but I definitely don’t feel like the software is what’s holding me back!
Last time I used it, it wasn’t ready for a Retina HiDPI screen (MacBooks since 2013), but I might want to double-check that. I remember the icons were pixelated. And I’m very sure it did not work on Wayland, which generates a bunch of weird bugs / issues for a multi-monitor setup. I never work with just one display. So, I can use it when I have to, but most times I prefer Gimp. Haven’t been opening Krita for over a year or so. Text editing is a gimp too. Apart from that, the interface wasn’t that bad as it is with Gimp, that’s for sure. Overall, I believe that’s actually a pretty nice program, Krita.
Well, I use an XP Pen display tablet, so effectively a second monitor. I’ve used both Krita on Ubuntu using X11 (in 2024 and before) and since the start of 2025 been using Bazzite which uses Wayland.
Can’t say I’ve run into any display specific issues. Pen tracking gave me some trouble, but it was some setting in KDE and Open Tablet Driver I had to play with to fix that.
My issue was that when run through XWayland, Krita would work only on the primary display (no concept of that in Wayland) with 0,0 coordinates. So, if I’m on a laptop, it would work only on the primary (laptop) screen, but not the external one. I have a script that reorganises my workspaces and makes the external display the primary one, then runs Krita. But it would never work on any other display, if I wanted to use that too, for some multi monitor setup.
I may want to try that again, perhaps that was some bug that was fixed. But I’m surely not going to use X instead of Wayland for Krita.
Interesting. I’ve never experienced this. Back when Wayland wasn’t even considered as a main display server yet there were problems with resolution scaling and desktop sizes, but… Straight up not working?
Hmm… But what do you mean with it doesn’t work? How doesn’t/didn’t it work? What prevented you from, say, opening Krita and just dragging the window to the monitor you want?
The window is unresponsive to clicks, so the mouse never works. You can drag it to the main laptop’s screen, but my laptop is small and the external screen is big, so it’s not useful to have such an app opened on a tiny screen. There are workarounds, but having a native Wayland app is just much more useful than hacking around. Last time I checked (was quite a long time ago, up to a year ago) the development wasn’t too focused on Wayland. I hope they’d do at some point, as overall Krita is good.
I made/maintain a UI-style from scratch for Inkscape, if anyone is interested. It addresses various UI issues
That looks much better, I’m going to try it, thanks for sharing!
nice, feel free to give any feedback if you have any problems with it.
Hey, I tried it. Is it only themes in the settings, or should I do something else. The interface became a bit more aesthetically appealing, so a nice work on that regard. But my pain point is the panels and their very weird behaviour (like you do resize and they are too much all the time). I expect you cannot address that with a theme.
I’m going to keep it, so I may comment more some days / weeks later, if you will.
Yes, this is “surface level” styling as a theme. It targets Inkscape-specific widgets as much as possible, which improves things considerably. It does not change Inkscape beyond the styling level
If you could explain your panel issue in more detail (I don’t understand what you meant exactly) and if there isn’t already, it would be good to submit it as a issue to Inkscape directly
Rawtherapee is really fucking good, I used it on Windows before discovering Linux
Since no one else has said it… Pixelorama is somewhat focused on making pixel art and animations, but it’s great at what it does.
WOAH. How have I not seen this? Looks like a fantastic alternative to Aseprite!
Well, for image manipulation, I can only think of GIMP as I have been using it for close to 2 decades. But because I have barely scratched the surface of what you can do with it, I don’t know if it would be a suitable replacement for your use-case. Also of note, its UI is definitely not a one-to-one reproduction of Photoshop’s, so it will require some getting used to.
There’s a github project called PhotoGIMP that makes the GIMP UI feel a lot like photoshop, aimed at transitioning users.
Edit: here
Interesting, thanks guy’s!
It’s Photoshop CS2 in your browser
Photo editing: darktable
Digital Art: Krita
Illustrator type stuff: InkscapePain: Gimp. although the PhotoGIMP plugin makes it bearable.
OR wait for the recent wine patch to mature a bit more and then you can literally just use Photoshop.
Krita is what I use but I also find text handling difficult so I always do text last.
Pinta is pretty decent for some things, like a paint.net for Linux.
GIMP, but you definitely should install also the GMIC and resynthesiser plugins. With GMIC especially, you’re getting so many things that not even Photoshop can do, making GIMP objectively superior.
Edit: If you mean you’re looking for a raw editor, meaning you change the colors and how the image themselves look, then you need Darktable. This is a raw editor. GIMP is mainly for VFX.
What do personally use G’MIC for?
The example screenshots all look gimmicky (heh) or super advanced scientific image processing.
I guess noise reduction is useful to the average user. Depends on how good it is.
Two of my favourite ones are median and montage. One I use for mood boards, the other one is to get rid of either noise or people in images.
Have you tried PhotoGIMP? The link is in the sibling comments. I wonder if the difference, my first time hearing of GMIC.
Yeah, I’ve tried photogimp, but it just changes the layout to be more comfortable for Photoshop users, which I’m not. GMIC is a collection of different VFX.
Do people still like https://www.photopea.com/ ?
I started using Krita, which is amazing and does lots of things I do, but the text editor when I try to resize text, it just ruins it and gets blurry sometimes. Then I found inkscape, which was good for, text and everything else worked fine, but not much of photo editor.
Inkscape is like Adobe illustrator. It’s for vector graphics and text. it’s not great for photos/pictures/pixelated things. Like, you can add those as objects to a document. But you want to edit the images somewhere else. Maybe a krita --> inkscape workflow could work for you?
I also use kdenlive for video editing, and rawtherapee for DSLR photos editing.
If you’re also just kinda exploring software for fun, I recommend trying to play around with blender for more specialized video editing. Like, if you want to add complex effects, or motion track/stabilize, whatever. It’s an extremely powerful piece of software (best to look at tutorials, idk if anyone can figure that shit out on their own). All I’ve done with it is stabilize some video (which I then used in a kdenlive project), and I absolutely haven’t even scratched the surface.
People sleep on Blender’s “VSE” capabilities so much. I feel like an extension to make it a little bit more turnkey like Kadenlive could be helpful, but it’s a VERY good video editor and I think few users really know how much it can do in that realm.
Last time I did Krita ----> inkspace, not much hassle. I know Blender, I didn’t know that it could do video editing.
