
Linux doesn't have Photoshop - hellozee
https://www.hellozee.dev/linux_doesnt_have_photoshop/
======
saurik
I have long felt that if Adobe were to take their already-very-cross-platform
(even afaik using a custom toolkit) tool suite and port it to Linux, they
could _own_ Linux: they should create an Adobe Linux distribution and bless a
single toolkit and then I think you would suddenly see people actually feeling
like they could both use it professionally and developers actually feeling
like they could target it effectively without worry of fragmentation (which I
am not saying is a horrible thing or anything--it is even a strength in some
sense--but there is a reason why the Android ecosystem, even with all of its
notorious fragmentation--feels much easier to target for games and GUI
applications than "Linux", despite _being Linux_ ). The main thing that would
have made this effort maybe useless before was the lack of a word processor
and a spreadsheet in their application lineup, but a lot of the world has
already moved on from Word and Excel to web-hosted solutions--whether from
Google _or from Microsoft_ \--and so the main barriers left are these "not
really likely to become web any time soon" (due to the amount of data
involved) tools like Photoshop and Premier and Audition. Hell: if they partner
with Valve/Steam--who is making great strides on Linux for games recently--
they could quite possibly destroy Windows as a pro-user market.

~~~
zozbot234
> they should create an Adobe Linux distribution and bless a single toolkit
> and then I think you would suddenly see people actually feeling like they
> could both use it professionally and developers actually feeling like they
> could target it effectively without worry of fragmentation

Corel tried this already with a Debian-derived distribution, like a proto-
Ubuntu of sorts. It didn't work, so they abandoned that effort.

~~~
kick
This worked so well for Corel or Caldera (I can't recall, they both did
distributions around this time) that Microsoft paid them to stop. The
successful one definitely didn't fail.

------
danShumway
> The feature you are requesting is probably for Photo editing or manipulating
> images that are currently not in our focus.

And if Krita was Photoshop, I wouldn't use it for illustration.

I don't want a photo manipulation tool, I want a painting program. Sure
Photoshop _can_ do all the fancy brush stuff, it can have fancy blend modes
and stuff, but the primary interface isn't designed with that in mind. It's a
manipulation tool. Using it for illustration is using a very broad "jack-of-
all-trades" program for something very focused, and that broad toolset
honestly kind of gets in the way.

I'm invested in Krita's future now, but if I wasn't I certainly wouldn't be
moving back to Photoshop. I need a tool that's specifically designed for
drawing. Pre-CC Photoshop had reasonably decent Wine support, but I've never
been tempted to load up an old copy for drawing.

To the extent that Krita is trying to replace anything, the problem that Krita
is attempting to solve is that Linux doesn't have Clip Studio.

------
knolan
In some ways Photoshop is losing relevance in the creative space. Adobe’s rent
seeking has pissed off a lot of people and upstarts like Krita, DaVinci
Resolve and Serif are making waves.

Affinity Photo and Designer offer strong Photoshop and Illustrator
alternatives on MacOS, Windows and even iPadOS (no plans for a Linux version
however) when Adobe seem to struggle to get a half baked version of Photoshop
on iPadOS.

All this competition is great. We’re seeing new performant software run rings
around the lumbering giants. I’m a huge fan of blender. It boggles my mind how
small a footprint it has compared to other 3D applications.

~~~
duxup
Lightroom is still irreplaceable so far for me and photography.

~~~
e40
I would move from macOS to Linux as soon as there is a LR equivalent.

~~~
xbhdhdhd
Darktable

~~~
e40
I looked at it. Seriously, not even close to LR.

~~~
Semiapies
Pretty much the case for Linux boosterism outside the command line. Almost
every desktop app is a shoddy imitation of a commercial app, pushed by people
who often don't know the real apps.

And if you point the shortcomings out, they whine that the shoddy app is only
built by three guys and so it's unfair to judge it...

------
kube-system
> Krita has all the bases covered, you only need to add these things and I can
> ditch GIMP/Photoshop.

> The feature you are requesting is probably for Photo editing or manipulating
> images that are currently not in our focus.

Looks like the author answered their own question as to why some people still
aren't happy with the available options. After all, photo editing is what
_Photoshop_ was designed to do.

~~~
jdjdjjsjs
It doesn't appear this app is trying to be a straight up Photoshop
replacement.

If that's what people are looking for they can go to GIMP. So I don't see how
that answer specifically indicates why people would be unhappy with the
situation on Linux.

~~~
cthalupa
>It doesn't appear this app is trying to be a straight up Photoshop
replacement.

It isn't. It's an illustration tool.

Which is why this article is kind of weird: An (excellent! I love krita!)
adjacent tool exists, so why do people want the tool that fills a different
purpose?

~~~
Semiapies
Probably because people keep posting articles like this one.

~~~
hellozee
I never said Krita is a PS alternative, :P

~~~
cthalupa
Not in the article body, but titled an article 'Linux doesn't have Photoshop'
and then talking about something that isn't attempting to be Photoshop is
really clickbait-y.

------
sfc32
Hats off for developing such an amazing tool. The question not asked is "Why
create another image editing tool on Linux?". When 'competing' with a gorilla
like Photoshop, perhaps extending / rewriting Gimp would be a more effective
way to produce a high quality tool, instead of fracturing the community.

Not a criticism of the efforts, just the focus. It would be really great to
have a FOSS alternative to the increasingly expensive and locking-in Adobe
suite.

~~~
errantspark
Honestly because this person is incorrect in their supposition that Krita
competes with Photoshop. Gimp competes with Photoshop (extremely poorly),
Krita is OSS Corel Painter and it's great at that. They're all image editing
tools sure, but the focus is different.

~~~
grawprog
Just curious, because i've never really understood, I see this a lot without
much explanation. I've used gimp for years for various image and photo things
and haven't used Photoshop since the mid 2000's, what's so bad about gimp in
comparison, other than the ui(which to me seems much the same as old versions
of photoshop), to Photoshop?

~~~
akersten
Personal and strongly-held opinion follows:

The biggest drawback of GIMP is that it is the least intuitive software I or
anyone I've asked in person has ever used.

Basic operations like making selections, cropping, and moving selections or
layers are a chore. The keyboard shortcuts don't make any sense, and the tool
icons all look the same, so I wind up hovering over each one to find the dang
crop tool in the first place. Oh, it's the one that looks like an X-acto knife
instead of the universal brackets icon for crop.

The selection tool is just _weird_. You can highlight a region of the image,
but to manipulate or transform it, there's no "Control+T" equivalent as far as
I've discovered.

The whole thing feels like a mess coming from Photoshop. Paint .NET has far
and away better usability.

Sure, you can accomplish the same things, eventually, and I guess that makes
them both capable image editors. But using GIMP feels like I'm interacting
with a machination of Dr. Seuss if he had to draw a Whoville contraption that
edited photos.

~~~
bscphil
> The biggest drawback of GIMP is that it is the least intuitive software I or
> anyone I've asked in person has ever used.

Personally I find GIMP far more intuitive than Photoshop. The problem with
GIMP for me is that most of the editing tools are pretty low quality, across
the board. The text layer tool is terrible, the filters aren't very good,
support for non-destructive editing is missing, the quality of edits are
pretty bad - at least for a long time curve adjustments were done in 8 bits,
leading to banding when trying to do almost any kind of significant
adjustment. That might still be the case, it wouldn't surprise me.

~~~
trynewideas
>> GIMP is the least intuitive software I or anyone I've asked in person has
ever used

> Personally I find GIMP far more intuitive than Photoshop

Whew, we did it! I was worried for a few minutes, but we're still at 100% of
GIMP/Photoshop comparisons containing this exchange in the comments.

~~~
bscphil
Well, that's not all that surprising, is it? The reason the response is
required is because people who use Photoshop frequently feel that it's just
_obvious_ to everyone that GIMP's interface is bad, and they need to be
reminded that quite a few people find it more simple and intuitive.

Other parts of the complaint don't make a lot of sense either. For example the
complaint about the icons -- I agree, the default icons are completely
unintelligible. But GIMP ships with alternative icon sets, several of which
are far easier for me to use and discern.

As someone who does use Photoshop sometimes, and still uses Lightroom as my
primary tool for photography, I still prefer GIMP and its simple interface for
quick edits.

------
newnewpdro
> The text tool is horrible, how could you even ship it?

I haven't tried Krita yet, but recently had to do some text compositions in
GIMP 2.8.18 (Debian 9.11) and the UX was absolutely _awful_. I don't remember
GIMP's text tool driving me insane when I last did such things a decade or
longer ago, but the on-canvas widget in 2.8.18 is quite bad.

~~~
a1369209993
FWIW, GIMP 2.6's text tool is solidly mediocre. I stopped updating because 2.8
broke Ctrl-S (vocally on purpose), so it wouldn't surprise me if they also
ruined text compositions. Contra zozbot234, it is very unlikely upgrading to
Debian 10 will improve anything.

------
Finnucane
Linux doesn’t really have a good alternative to InDesign.

For photo editing I find that Darktable & Gimp serve me well enough.
Fortunately, I don’t need to worry about CMYK any more.

~~~
faceplanted
Noob question, why is CMYK editing different from any other kind of editing?
You can convert rgb to CMYK, every printer does it, so what's actually
missing?

~~~
wtracy
Not a color expert, but every color encoding scheme is going to have a
slightly different gamut. Meaning, CMYK can encode colors that RGB can't, and
vice-versa.

~~~
zozbot234
Negative color values can be used to cleanly represent colors outside the
standard gamut. But I'm not sure that CMYK even _has_ anything like a standard
gamut associated with it - so the details of that "conversion" might depend on
what the CMYK data is for.

------
fbnlsr
This has been my only argument for years for not switching to Linux. I've
realized I haven't used Photoshop in more than two years now. I either work on
projects where the designers provide me with already cut and ready to use
props, or I work with people using Figma.

My only argument now is that my Macbook is still working and I don't "have" to
spend 2k on a Thinkpad. :)

~~~
cairo_x
Sweet jesus, don't get a thinkpad after having used a macbook. They are built
of soft, grease-absorbing cheap plastic.

People say 'oh, but thinkpads are so rebuildable'. Yeah. Because they degrade
easily and are made of such cheap materials, they have to be.

I bought a second hand dell laptop. Five years later bought a brand new
thinkpad. Which do you think had to be repaired, and even with new parts still
looks more worn out?

~~~
fbnlsr
You're the first one to tell me not to get a Thinkpad.

I've heard nothing but great things about them.

~~~
hellozee
The newer thinkpads are meh, compared to what the older ones were

------
Animats
From the article: "Yes, all of us know the text tool (in Krita) is horrible
but at least it is a bit better than the last one which was just pure shit."
Pinta also has a terrible text tool. It's so bad that sometimes the font
selector disappears and you can't get it back. Generic problem with Linux
image editors?

I'd settle for something on Linux that works as well as Photoshop Elements
from ten years ago.

~~~
bscphil
GIMP is just astoundingly bad in this area as well. The hinting is bad looking
enough that you have to disable it, and when you enable anti-aliasing
(required for decent looking fonts) it enables _sub-pixel_ anti-aliasing too,
which already doesn't make much sense since the results are so completely
different on different LCD screens, but it's implemented in a retina-searingly
bad fashion. I don't know why they don't just use the standard FreeType
rendering, which looks fine on my system.

So to get decent looking fonts in GIMP, I have to do this:

1\. Render the fonts into a layer with 3x the final resolution, hinting
disabled, and anti-aliasing enabled.

2\. Use the desaturation filter to get rid of the terrible colorful pixels
created by the anti-aliasing.

3\. Scale the layer back down 3x to the final size I wanted.

The fact that this works proves there's no inherent reason why GIMP couldn't
have good font rendering, but it's been a mess for as long as I can remember.

~~~
bscphil
One additional note that seemed important in case anyone reads this: I just
tested GIMP's font rendering on macOS and it's _completely_ different than on
Linux. There's no "colorful" sub pixel rendering, and the results seem
blurrier to me at the same font size, although the latter might be because
this is on a high DPI screen with scaling.

So consider the above to only apply to the Linux version of GIMP.

------
michaelbrave
Web based alternatives might eat Adobe's lunch here. Figma is gaining steam
and the collaboration feature might be enough to win, photopea does about 80%
of what I want photoshop to do (excepting especially large projects). The only
real holdup is video editing since it takes quite a bit of resources.

~~~
hellozee
Figma is good, but Photopea is ... well, not bad but something feels missing
from it.

------
hirundo
> If still after applying the suggestions it does not work, it is just a bad
> tablet manufacturer. Krita adheres to the standard APIs provided by the
> Operating System. Unfortunately, your tablet manufacturer is a stupid one

Same here, if my software breaks it must be the stupid hardware.

~~~
Semiapies
And pretty much every other point in this article is that any users who find
the program insufficient are stupid, unpleasable assholes who should fix it
themselves if they care so damn much.

~~~
hellozee
I never told them to fix it, they can file a bug report which would help, if
Krita seg faults then there is dialog which does that for you, :)

------
matthewhartmans
Check out Photopea: [https://www.photopea.com](https://www.photopea.com)

Complete replica of Photoshop in the browser.

~~~
Grakel
It's amazingly powerful. I have my students use it instead of dealing with
Adobe.

------
paulcarroty
[https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=37541)

Hard to say how many percents working, but basics can be used without issues.

------
AstralStorm
Linux doesn't have Illustrator either and that's a bigger problem most of the
time.

Inkscape and Krita aren't there yet. Photoshop is rather optimized for
modifying pictures rather than drawing, but a lot of people I know in drawing
are actually using Illustrator instead...

Scribus is also still rather weak compared to InDesign. (And no, you won't
convert the world to LaTeX with LyX. Too complex.)

------
bilal4hmed
per the post, Krita has 5 paid developers and if you look at the front page,
for the month of december they have received donations of about $2500. If
donations are the major source of funding, they are severely underfunded.

If some of us have budgets that allow for it, might not be a bad idea to send
some money their way.

~~~
pkaye
I think recently Krita got a Epic Games Mega Grant of $25k.
[https://krita.org/en/item/krita-receives-epic-
megagrant/](https://krita.org/en/item/krita-receives-epic-megagrant/)

------
bluedino
What are the odds of a small team bringing a product like Pixelmator to the
Mac?

~~~
hellozee
I dont think you can call this team[1] small, compared to Krita, :)

[1][https://www.pixelmator.com/team/](https://www.pixelmator.com/team/)

------
anta40
I kinda miss Photoshop.

Well, I'm a big fan of black and white photography. One of the plugins I rely
on is Silver Efex: [https://nikcollection.dxo.com/silver-efex-
pro/](https://nikcollection.dxo.com/silver-efex-pro/)

I still don't found the equivalent for GIMP. Probably the closes thing is
G'MIC: [https://gmic.eu/](https://gmic.eu/)

------
6d65
Funny thing is that I wanted to buy the Affinity Suite a couple of weeks ago
on black Friday sale, and gave up after finding out that it works poorly via
Wine. Learned to do basic stuff with Gimp instead.

So far Gimp works well for my needs, it's slow, buggy, but still can work with
it. Might configure a Windows VM with kvm passthrough if I desperately needed.
Also web tools like figma look very interesting.

------
chadlavi
Or more importantly, product design tools. Sketch is the main reason I use a
Mac.

------
Paianni
Linux doesn't need Photoshop, it needs a GIMP on steroids.

------
rolltiide
Nice post about Krita

Anyway it would be nice if Linux had Photoshop, why haven’t they done this
sometime over the last two decades when people first noticed

~~~
hellozee
Porting to linux isn't worth it. Cause most of the people who would switch are
existing customers. And with the CC model it is never going to happen

~~~
rolltiide
Yes the same reason for the past two decades

If anyone from Adobe is reading this, I would use CC with subscription on
linux and advocate for licenses in my whole office if it was an option

Cheers

~~~
hellozee
You didn't get it right? Most of the customers who would switch are already
using CC on Mac or Windows so why add the costs of maintenance and support for
another platform.

Aside from that, their code base is somewhat quirky, which would definitely
increase the cost of porting

~~~
rolltiide
I understood what you said exactly and thats why I also added the part where
_new licenses would also happen_ as a single customer datapoint accessing many
organizations over my career. The more datapoints for them the better.

I look forward to the day when Krita or GIMP’s sole purpose for existing isn't
Adobe dug their own hole.

~~~
hellozee
Can't speak for GIMP but Krita is growing exponentially, :)

------
akersten
> I started using Photoshop when I was in High School and obviously it was a
> ——- copy.

I can only assume the censored portion read "pirated." Is the author concerned
they would be admitting to a crime had they left it in? I'm not sure there are
any other interpretations to "obviously it was a [...] copy" either, so I
don't see why they bothered. Probably should have left that out entirely if
they were worried.

~~~
mark-r
There's no good way to "nudge nudge, wink wink" in a text medium. I thought
the chosen technique was perfectly fine, it got the idea across without
leaving anything legally actionable.

Adobe has in the past had a bit of tolerance for under-the-table copies. If
you get hooked on PS at an early age there's a good chance you'll insist on it
when you reach a position with a budget.

