For both my home server and desktop I use XFS for root and ZFS (in some variety of raid or mirror) for /home and data storage. Any time I’ve tried btrfs for root (such as default fedora), inevitably it poops the bed. At this point, I stay far away from btrfs.
Looking past your downvotes, this is another good example of why I find it difficult to learn GIMP. As far as I know, you need to use a box selection to draw a box? Like border that selection or something? In what way is that intuitive from any perspective? It feels more like a workaround, rather than a solution.
The process for a box is rectangle select tool>(right click)>edit>stroke selection.
If I remember correctly it used to be worse. It was Rectangle Tool, Edit, Selection to Path, Stroke Path
I love/hate gimp but I've used it for years because it's faster and easier than cracking photoshop on a new device.
You can draw a box with the paintbrush tool, though. That also fixes your thing about triangle. Or if you want the lines to be totally straight, use the Paths tool, then when you’re done marking the lines you want (with or without curves) you click “stroke path” and get a window to select how you want the stroke to be.
That’s either selecting the paintbrush and drawing directly (1 click and drawing) or selecting the paths tool, making the path, and choosing the line style (1 click + however many points needed + 1 click + selecting parameters (I just went for the default to test) + 1 click to confirm).
But then again; GIMP isn’t meant to be a drawing program, it’s Image Manipulation Program. Use the right tools for the right things.
That’s easy, I just tried it and I haven’t used GIMP that much in total and not at all in the previous year and a half.
You can draw a box with the paintbrush tool. Or if you want the lines to be totally straight, use the Paths tool, then when you’re done marking the lines you want (with or without curves) you click “stroke path” and get a window to select how you want the stroke to be. And I figured this out very quickly as a user not very well versed in GIMP.
As I also wrote in this comment; GIMP is meant to be an Image Manipulation Program, not a drawing program. You generally don’t use a screwdriver to drive nails into wood, you’ve got a hammer for that. Sure, you can use a screwdriver for it in a pinch, but it’s not going to do it well. Use the tools most appropriate for the thing you’re actually trying to do.
That’s clever. I’m not used to shell scripting yet, but I really like that it is easy to automate things in Linux. If you can run it in terminal, you can script it.
I don’t think a week is that long to wait for an open source project like this. I suspect as soon as they released 115 they got a deluge of bug reports that are probably keeping them occupied.
Granted, I’m not personally affected because <smug>I use Arch btw</smug>. But on a serious note, it makes sense to me that “bleeding edge” distros where users expect the latest versions quickly would package Thunderbird for their repos, whereas those on more stability-focused distros would wait the couple of weeks for the Flatpak.
Ext4 is probably going to be the fastest. When it comes to reliability, old is good. If you don’t need any of the features Btrfs and ZFS, you’ll reap higher performance using Ext4. Otherwise ZFS is more feature-complete compared to Btrfs, however it’s generally not available as root fs option in OS installers. Ubuntu used to have it as an experimental option but I think that’s gone now. If you know what you’re doing you can use it as a root fs. Personally I’m using Ext4 on LVMRAID on a 2-way NVMe mirror. I might be switching to ZFS on root when I get to rebuild this machine. All my storage is using ZFS.
After some time living with Gimp/Krita etc. you will learn to do the things you did with Photoshop. It does takes some time and research/learning. I was real comfy with PS and do miss it but the more I’ve gone without, the more I’ve found ways to tackle the things I need to do with alternatives.
Other than Affinity, I don’t know who else is competing against Photoshop in the professional space. Neither have native Linux builds.
There’s also PhotoGIMP which patches GIMP to make it look like Photoshop. You can also try installing Photoshop or Affinity via WINE.
If not, why?
Neither Adobe nor Serif see Linux as a potential market. As for the open source ones, I’m guessing it’s because their funding and development team isn’t as big as an industrial giant like Adobe. I’m happy Blackmagic Design supports Linux to some degree and I get to have DaVinci Resolve on Linux natively. I wouldn’t be on Linux if DaVinci Resolve did not work natively tbh.
I love Affinity, moreso than anything Adobe makes. I also work in the creative suite all day as a designer. If Affinity would expand to linux, I’d suggest the switch whinin our department immediately.
At least Affinity doesn’t screw around with Pantone support. They have that figured out.
Davinci Resolve originally ran on SGI and Sun graphic workstations, which ran IRIX and SOLARIS respectively, both System V UNIX-based OSs. It’s pretty cool that they’ve maintained *nix-based support all of these decades.
the thing about gimp and krita is: gimp is an image manipulation software and krita is a drawing software, and as far as i can see from my so’s work, photoshop is a somewhat mixture of those two. from the jump, we’re not comparing apples to apples, unfortunately.
but you already answered your own question, i think.
see, foss programs aren’t there to be a drop-in replacment for their closed sourced alternatives. they emerge from a need from the community. what is more, usually you will have multiple programs encompassing a single workflow of their closed sourced counterparts; meaning they are modular.
so even if there was some other program apart from these, it would have a learning curve, unless adobe open sources photoshop. so there is a viable alternative (which i know from experience) but there is a learning curve, albeit a steep one for someone coming from photoshop.
you shouldn’t limit yourself, but it would immensely improve your understanding of the software if you try to recreate simple pieces of your workflow using gimp, once in a while.
Yes I actually checked whether my flatpaks were updating properly the other day because of this. I think being the official package if anything I would have expected Flathub to have it first, or at least within a few hours. I understand that things don’t always go to plan but starting to get a bit impatient here with the lack of explanation.
Funny, this is literally one of the primary examples of something that GIMP did better than Photoshop (at least back when I was actively using GIMP a lot). GIMP has the "color-to-alpha" tool that allows for backgrounds to be faded into transparency (including converting the border of that object into translucent pixels that don't have the hint of the old background), which I remember being the easiest way to remove sky or other background from an object, and to place that object into a new background or other image.
I'm guessing that in the 10 years since, Photoshop has a bunch of those AI tools that can do that specific function almost automatically. But GIMP does do that specific task pretty well.
Erasing the white around an object is crazy easy in GIMP. select color, delete. done. That's one task that is easier in GIMP then in Photoshop in my opinion.
habit and practice. op himself said he believes gimp can do wonders, but he’s migrating from adobe and is accustomed to photoshop’s shortcuts, ui and workflow.
imho, people go wrong expecting same experience in different application. yes, gimp works very differently but when migrating, one should count on different ui and logic. afterall, ps also have learning curve in the start and none complains.
it’s similar to users migrating from windows to linux, expecting same windows ui and workflow, blaming linux bad.
When all my experience with image manipulation programs was paint.net and I wanted something more powerful I tried gimp. I hated it. I saw it was powerful but the ux just isn’t great. It’s really complicated and unfriendly for new users. When I then tried using photoshop, it was really easy to get into. And that’s a general problem with foss. Most big closed source programs had millions spent on ux research. Most foss programs never think about the average user but are instead by professionals for professionals.
I don’t think it is UX research so much as that user interfaces for people using a program every day for hours are genuinely different in the optimization space than user interfaces that are easily discoverable for new users and the occasional user.
habit and practice. op himself said he believes gimp can do wonders, but he’s migrating from adobe and is accustomed to photoshop’s shortcuts, ui and workflow.
imho, people go wrong expecting same experience in different application. yes, gimp works very differently but when migrating, one should count on different ui and logic. afterall, ps also have learning curve in the start and none complains.
it’s similar to users migrating from windows to linux, expecting same windows ui and workflow, blaming linux bad.
They did list one specific example of text wrapping which is apparently a two step process on Photoshop and twenty steps in GIMP. Probably an exaggeration, but the sentiment seems to be that it isn’t just different, its worse.
Dealing with differences is fine, but things that are more difficult or require more steps is a problem that should hopefully be fixed.
yeah, having 30 years of Photoshop experience and then being told I have to learn a whole new tool that looks and works completely differently? it took a very long time to become a master of this one tool. now I have to completely re-learn and re-master a new one?
no thanks.
not to mention that GiMP is just a pain in the ass to use.
While I get your point about not expecting all software to have the same workflow, keep in mind that learning a new one isn’t always in the cards. The reason people don’t complain when learning Adobe is because they are probably starting with it. But if they complain when switching to GIMP it’s because they have to spend the time to learn a new system instead of getting their work done. And especially in a professional environment, that just ends up causing problems.
While I get your point about not expecting all software to have the same workflow, keep in mind that learning a new one isn’t always in the cards. The reason people don’t complain when learning Adobe is because they are probably starting with it. But if they complain when switching to GIMP it’s because they have to spend the time to learn a new system instead of getting their work done. And especially in a professional environment, that just ends up causing problems.
One example, the paint bucket tool does not anti-alias correctly in certain circumstancess so no matter the tolerance setting, you get either white outlines around your fill, or the fill explodes outside the lines and gets everywhere.
This is something solved by other software in the nineties but Gimp still hasn’t bothered to fix.
Is this a niche problem? Yes. But when trying to do professional work, lots of detail issues like this can add up.
If this comment isn’t the perfect distillation of the frustration people have with GIMP, I don’t know what is.
OP makes a very even-handed, consciencious treatise to gather more info about alternatives to GIMP based on the UX issues they themselves have been struggling with and which are commonly recognized throughout the community, with at least one example, while acknowledging how incredible and powerful an undertaking a piece of software GIMP definitely is, and…
… The same cookie cutter response on every single GIMP discussion since 1998: “IT IS VERY POWERFUL. WHAT FEATURE IS IT MISSING?”
Similar to GIMP itself: You’re not wrong you’re just… Not being anywhere near as helpful as you could be.
I dunno. The title was “Are there really no viable alternatives to PhotoShop on Linux?”. I think it’s fair to say, “There’s GIMP”. It’s viable. People use it successfully and happily. 'Nuff said.
To paraphrase: “if we only pay attention to the most fundamental requirements and ignore any nuance and subtlety that’s added, the implementation is perfect. What’s the problem?”
Or: “Why care about the body of the post when there’s at title?”
Since no one else seems to actually be answering you, I’ll give you one. Smart Objects AKA linked layers. I use these in just about every single PSD and it has saved me rediculous amounts of time and effort undoing or redoing edits and avoiding destruction of a raster image by rotating or scaling it multiple times.
There has been a feature request open for this for 10 years and it is still not implemented. I first found out about the intention to add linked layers several years ago but I quickly gave up when I realised how much time it was taking.
I couldn’t tell you other features as I have not used Gimp much beyond trying it out for some light projects and to make use of some of it’s better-than-Photoshop color to alpha tools. But this one feature combined with all the UI, behaviour, and shortcut decisions is enough to keep me stuck on Photoshop for Windows for a long while yet.
Fair enough. I guess it depends on what you're used to. I never used Photoshop and I've been using Gimp for over a decade now. I do a lot of visual editing for my work and there isn't anything I haven't been able to do with Gimp. But yes, some stuff do take hours of work. I also work with FOSS music production software and while I know the commercial ones are easier to use, everything I've wanted to accomplish using FOSS music production I've been able to get it done. I guess it all depends on what your reference point is
+1 for Photopea. I found it extremely friendly coming from Photoshop, has a lot of functionalities and works great on computers where I can’t/won’t install Photoshop. YMMV though, since you want to use it as a full replacement and I used it only for simple retouching/modifications when I’m not on the desktop
Surprised I had to scroll this far to see Photopea. It’s a fantastic alternative to Photoshop, and it’s accessible on nearly any platform since it’s web-based.
Another +1 for Photopea from me. I had been on-and-off wrestling with Wine to get Photoshop to run since I had switched to Linux, but since discovering Photopea I haven’t felt the need to bother with that. In addition to the website version, if you aren’t religiously anti-Electron, there’s a desktop app for it on Flathub.
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