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.
> 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.
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.
Did COREL not have their Linux distro? I vaguely remember having 3.0 install discs lying around. Certainly not remember if it ran any corel applications though
Adobe actually did extensive market study regarding a PS Linux port. The conclusion was that there is basically zero demand for a PAID Photoshop. People do want PS on Linux,but they want a FREE version (sudo apt-get install photoshop)
zero demand for a PAID Photoshop? If that's what the study really concluded then it completely failed to take into account current customers who want to switch to linux.
> If you need Photoshop, you'll stay on platforms where it's supported.
Sure, but your customers will resent you for it and search for alternatives. Vendor lock-in is not a good long term strategy. Competition will eventually catch up.
> If you don't, you'll probably not pay for it anyway.
Maybe I should have said low exclusive Linux demand. Current customers are already paying, and ditching Photoshop is not a credible threat, at least at the moment.
People will always say they want free Thing over paid Thing, and it doesn't matter what OS's you support - piracy will happen in any case. But if people are going to be using Photoshop anyway, having linux support would be good.
I think it would come down to convenience - even if it was still paid software, having it as an apt/yum/whatever repository and either having it prompt for licensing / seek out a FlexLM server / etc. on launch would be great for linux users. Even better if if you could just apt-get install adobe-cs (or whatever it's called now) as a metapackage and let it pull in photoshop et al. as individual subpackages that could be updated independently instead of massive multi-gig monolith packages.
Edit notice: I completely overwrote the initial version of this comment, which said I couldn't find these posts, because I realized I was using the wrong search time terms and found what parent mentioned.
Appimage has solved the distribution on Linux problem, software packaged as Appimages are as easy to run as an exe on Windows, and no additional software is required (unlike Flatpak & Snap).
The forum comment is from 10 years ago. I have no idea if it still (or ever) accurately describes Abobe's internal decision-making. I do not and have never worked for Adobe, so regardless of the merits of your assertions I can't change anything.
That said, if I had to make an assumption about Adobe's perspective, I'd assume that the position of many linux users that desktop software shouldn't require a recurring subscription was (and is) the main obstacle from Adobe's perspective, not distribution.
> 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.
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.
Darktable is an excellent RAW developer. I learned it without ever knowing lightroom since I was a full-time Linux home user before I got into DSLR photography. I learned by following this playlist of tutorials and am amazed at the possibilities of creative expression in the digital darkroom.
I've been shocked how good the results I been able to get with RawTherapee are. It's extremely buggy, or was when I was last using it regularly, but it's capable of replicating or exceeding anything you can get with Lightroom except for Lightroom's profiled corrections (denoising / defringing) and the (limited) content aware editing features Lightroom has.
The distinction is basically in ease of use. What I've found is that Lightroom has a bunch of linear sliders that take you mostly through the range of what looks "good" photographically. You'll want to adjust contrast (for example) and each position of the slider will look good in its own way (though the end points obviously top out looking silly).
RawTherapee has a lot more multi-dimensional editing modes, and the vast majority of options in this multi-dimensional space make no sense at all photographically. The way Lightroom is programmed you basically get a little less control, but more expressivity, because when you change a slider the image tends to accurately reflect what you actually wanted the photograph to look like. Lightroom feels kind of magical like that, whereas you have to put in the hard work in RawTherapee. But it is quite usable, when it doesn't crash or fail to read your DNGs.
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...
Strange, I've had Photoshop CC2019 running fine with no issues and I've been on Catalina since the very first dev release. CC2020 is also now working fine. Truly software is the most fickle of beasts.
> Which Photoshop versions are compatible with macOS Catalina?
> Photoshop 21.0 & Photoshop 20.0.7 work with macOS 10.15 (Catalina) but have these known compatibility issues. You may want to remain on your current version of macOS until these issues have been resolved.
> If anyone else has this issue that states: "the installer was damaged and may need to be downloaded again" I got around this by right clicking the installer and showing package contents > contents > MacOS and clicking on the install file found there
Have you tried this? I have CC 2019 installed on Catalina.
I’m dealing with the workarounds and have it running. But what I find interesting is that photoshop is one of the biggest software packages and they are out OA sync with Apple.
This is Adobe we're talking about, their video editor can't handle multiple audio streams in standard video formats and codecs (think game capture footage with game audio and microphone on separate channels), in fucking 2019. It can tell there's multiple streams, but it doesn't detect the sizes of any of them past the first one, and won't let you use them as-is; you need to extract them from the video container and import them as audio files and manually sync them to the timeline.
And some people suggest I'm supposed to feel guilty for pirating their stuff. Hah.
> 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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
As you said, Paint.NET has far better usability despite GIMP actually having more features.
The icons really need an overhaul with GIMP, that hovering over each icon to see if it is the crop tool, and lack of Control+T struck all too close to home.
> 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.
I don't know what ctrl+T is (there may be some nuance I'm missing), but in Gimp the corner resize handles are always visible in a selection, the side handles appear on mouseover, and moving a selection is click+drag in the center.
Control+T is the shortcut in Photoshop for Free Transform, which turns your selected region into a click+drag target for translating; the corners and edges become resize handles for the selected content; outside of the corners becomes a rotate click target. There's also now a context menu for more advanced transformations like Skew, Perspective, etc.
It's pretty much an all-in-one toolbox of most anything you'd want to do with a selection, and I could never find a good equivalent of that in GIMP.
Regarding the handles in GIMP - last I tried them, they resized the selection region, rather than the underlying image, which was immensely frustrating.
Ah yeah, that's nothing like what I thought you meant. That said, if I wanted to do something like that in Gimp, I'd just cut-paste - this creates a temporary layer with the content positioned exactly where it was before, where you can use the standard layer manipulation tools to transform it. You can then use either the "new layer" button to promote it fully, or "anchor" to paste it back onto the original.
I haven't seriously taken a look at gimp in ages if I'm honest, but iirc it still doesn't have adjustment layers or support for more than 8bpp or color spaces other than RGB. The UI being awful is a major point against too, as is the poor performance. I'm sure there are use-cases where gimp is equivalent to Photoshop. I primarily use Photoshop in 16bit Lab color, so just off that it's a no-go.
Take an example you scaled down and 1000x1000px image to 100x100px and then scaled it up back to 1000x1000px. In the process you lost a lot of info on the image.
PS solves that by using Smart Objects, Krita by Transform Masks, GIMP? Nope
Gimp has most of the "magic" tools Photoshop has, but their algorithms perform inferiorly. For example, "automatically snap this selection to the outline of this thing in the image" (magnetic lasso tool).
Use Gimp's circle tool to create a circle. Create a new layer. Now, try and chance the dimensions of the circle itself rather than upscaling (and pixellating) it. As far as I know, this is not possible in Gimp, but it's expected in Photoshop.
ok but when the title of the article is “linux doesn’t have photoshop” and the article is set up to be an answer to that belief you can understand how some people might be confused
If Gimp wasn't completely terrible, despite the decades of work that's been put into it, I'd give that some weight. But it's just not good, and it's not going to be. Better to start over than keep throwing good money after bad.
I tried Gimp but from an UX Perspective it is just a horrible mess. Its ways are so idiosyncratic its unbelievable. Power to those who use it, but it is hardly surprising that it never gained traction in the graphics industry.
Affinity Photo is the first true contender; It optimizes for reliable and recognizable workflow, and the devs are committing to keeping it lean.
I wish there was an foss alternative, but there isn’t. I would love to see an app build around image editing like Blender is doing for 3d.
Krita started as an image editing tool, but now it is tool which you you would use for creating stuff from scratch, and not mainly for editing Photos or manipulating images, :D
> 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.
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.
Debian 9.11 is out of date and will soon be unsupported altogether. You should upgrade to Debian 10 (currently at 10.2) which comes with an up-to-date version of GIMP. If you can't do a wholesale upgrade for some reason, use the official backports channel to install an updated version of GIMP.
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?
Well you want to see what you are doing. RGB shows more colors than you can print. Theoreticaly when if you have cmyk profile from your printer and calibrated monitor you should see somehow accurate representation of how will things get printed.
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.
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.
They ever fix text selection in Scribus on Windows?
EDIT: Just installed 1.5.5 and nope, they haven't. Still no triple-click line or paragraph selection. Still no double-click-and-drag to select multiple words. Still only Ctrl+double-click to select a whole paragraph.
The same patterns to select text on every other piece of software on my computer don't work in this software designed to publish text.
I have no idea how y'all work with this stuff. GIMP and Scribus put basic functionality behind an obscurity gate, and then folks wonder why so many people have such a negative reaction to how they work.
It does not work for everyone unfortunately. Scribus is terrible for design work. Fine for setting prose but doing more complex layouts is pain. Unfortunately typesetting is so niche that there is no way it would get better.
Yes. At least at the time I tried it, it was not good, and choked on large documents. Perhaps it is better now, but it did not seem like it would be useful for professional work.
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. :)
I added Arch to my 2012 MacBook after it started feeling frustratingly sluggish. So you don’t need to wait to buy a new machine just to switch to Linux. There’s also the option to run it in a vm with some shared folders with your MacBook. You can basically live within the vm full time and switch out of it for photoshop.
I run Fedora on a 2011 MacBook Pro. There was a bit of messing around to get graphics working, and sometimes the trackpad driver crashes, but other than that, it works perfectly.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
I wasn’t trying to troll, I think those are legitimate comments. First one was questioning style and fashion norms, this one is questioning why spinlocks are necessary on a user developer friendly OS.
Ok, but such comments need to be more substantive. The burden is on the commenter to disambiguate them from trolling, since intention alone is insufficient.
> 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.
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.
