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.

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[–] 61 points 9 months ago* (16 children)

GIMP and Krita are aimed at Photoshop, while RawTherapee and Darktable are aimed at Lightroom, and Inkscape is aimed at Illustrator.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (13 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

    I made/maintain a UI-style from scratch for Inkscape, if anyone is interested. It addresses various UI issues

    https://gitlab.com/sxwpb/ink-sx-ui

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    That looks much better, I’m going to try it, thanks for sharing!

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    nice, feel free to give any feedback if you have any problems with it.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    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

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (7 children)

    I like the UI of Krita. Gimp is... Uh... Gimp. But Krita is certainly a modern drawing program.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    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!

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago* (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [+] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    I should have mentioned it more clearly that this could be a combination of bugs, not necessarily a Krita bug. Because this issue is not only with Krita, but many (or even all) XWayland apps. All Wine apps shared this too. So, the primary issue is that it needs XWayland instead of being Wayland-native.

    I use Sway on Arch Linux, and Gnome on Fedora. I haven’t been doing anything on Fedora for years, as it’s a shared family computer and it has just one display. So, I expect it would be good there. To my memory, it was. I was trying various graphical things, even Photoshop and Illustrator with Wine, and they were mostly working too.

    I think I could issue a DE for drawing sessions, when needed, if that solves the issue. So, thanks for mentioning that it’s issues-free on KDE. It’s more obvious to me now that actually Krita is a KDE thing, after all.

    But, honestly, it feels the same as doing my hacky scripts to mitigate the bug. I’d love it to just work, that’s why I mention I hope it would be Wayland native one day.

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  • [–] 18 points 9 months ago

    https://www.photopea.com/

    It's Photoshop CS2 in your browser

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  • [–] 23 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 22 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

    There's a github project called PhotoGIMP that makes the GIMP UI feel a lot like photoshop, aimed at transitioning users.

    Edit: here

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago
    [–] 9 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    The first item on your list should have been to try Gimp ?

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Pinta is pretty decent for some things, like a paint.net for Linux.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    I was just getting ready to ask. I've been a paint.net user for years, gets me by well enough anytime I need it. Switching to Linux, I found GIMP way too annoying for my liking.

    Might try this out or figure out how to run Paint.net on Linux.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago

    I just use gimp, but for the record, someone recently got modern Photoshop working in wine

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 9 months ago

    Photo editing: darktable
    Digital Art: Krita
    Illustrator type stuff: Inkscape

    Pain: 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.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago

    Krita is what I use but I also find text handling difficult so I always do text last.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    What are you doing with photoshop? If it's mostly photo editing, it's darktable that you're looking for.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago

    Personally I use GIMP. Been my photoshop replacement for at least a good 5ish years now, and it's come a long way! It has (imo) a pretty intuitive interface so it doesn't take too long to acclimate.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    I can recommend PhotoGIMP which makes GIMP UI fairly close to Ps.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    What do personally use G'MIC for?

    https://gmic.eu/

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    the text editor when I try to resize text, it just ruins it and gets blurry sometimes.

    I dunno what you're doing but... When you resize text, you usually want to select the text and increase the font size. Sometimes you can render to vector and resize that. But if you resize the text as pixels, then it'll probably look bad. Generally I try not to render text to pixels or do that last if necessary.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    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...

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    try also https://www.affinity.studio/ by Canva, free and run on linux great

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I know you said "alternatives to Photoshop" but if you don't find any, this video shows that you can run Photoshop on Linux now. Try it and see if it works for you

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Gimp and Darktable should do the trick !

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