Is there really no viable alternative for Photoshop on Linux?

I’m starting this off by saying that I’m looking for any type of reasonably advanced photo manipulation tool, that runs natively under Linux. It doesn’t have to be FOSS.

I switched to Linux, from Windows, about three years ago. I don’t regret the decision whatsoever. However, one thing that has not gotten me away from Windows entirely, is the severe lack of photo editing tools.

So what’s available? Well, you have GIMP. And then there’s Krita, but that’s more of a drawing software. And then…

Well that’s it. As far as I know.

  1. GIMP

Now, as someone migrating from Photoshop, GIMP was incredibly frustrating, and I didn’t understand anything even after a few weeks of trying to get into it. Development seemed really slow, too. It’s far from intuitive, and things that really should take a few steps, seemingly takes twenty (like wrapping text on a path? Should that really be that difficult?).

I would assume if you’re starting off with GIMP, having never touched Photoshop, then it’d be no issue. But as a user migrating, I really can’t find myself spending months upon months to learn this program. It’s not viable for me.

No hate against GIMP, I’m sure it works wonders for those who have managed to learn it. But I can’t see myself using it, and I don’t find myself comfortable within it, as someone migrating from Photoshop.

  1. Krita

Krita, on the other hand, I like much more. But, it’s more of a drawing program. Its development is more focused on drawing, and It’s missing some features that I want - namely selection tools. Filters are good, but I find G’MIC really slow. It also really chugs when working with large files.

Both of these programs are FOSS. I like that. I like FOSS software. But, apart from that, are there really no good alternatives to Photoshop? Again, doesn’t need to be FOSS. I understand more complex programs take more development power, and I have no problem using something even paid and proprietary, as long as it runs on Linux natively.

I’ve tried running Photoshop under WINE, and it works - barely. For quick edits, it might work fine. But not for the work I do.

So I raise the question again. Are there no good alternatives to Photoshop? And then I raise a follow-up question, that you may or may not want to answer: If not, why?

Thanks in advance!

Reva,

Darktable if you want to do professional photography editing, and GIMP if you want to modify graphics, pixelart, design flyers or handouts, posters, or whatever else you want to do in a raster editor.

I have been using GIMP since fifth grade in school when we had an intro to photo manipulation, and since whenever I needed something edited, composited or designed. It blows my mind again and again that people online apparently find GIMP hard to use or unintuitive. It’s one of the most normal programs I have ever used. Photoshop on the other hand feels utterly inconceivable to me.

dino,

If not, why?

I mean, how much money is Adobe investing in Photoshop? Also I am really curious about GIMP really as bad as you and others here describe it as… I have the feeling people expect a carbon copy of Photoshop where they can use their brain imprinted workflows to achieve the exact same results. This of course is just asking for failure. You rather have to get used to GIMPs (any other FOSS program) workflows and see if you can achieve similar results and decide if the increased time spent worth it, to use a software which is free and open source or not.

shotgun_crab,

It mostly depends on what features of Photoshop you use. If you use most of them, there’s no real alternative imo. If you only use a subset of its features, then GIMP, Krita, Photopea or Pinta may become viable alternatives for your use case.

hare_ware,

Or Inkscape or Blender. Deforming text on along a curve isn’t really something I’d use anything try to be Photoshop for TBH.

michaelmrose,

Adobe’s annual revenue is over 18 billion dollars Gimp has one developer who is almost full time and various part time contributions. One answer is that Linux support would be both non-trivial and would only add 1-3% to revenue for a multi platform editor. There WAS a reputably professional editor bloom.app at one point but it seems to have died.

allforthebest,

Bruhh GIMP is so hard to use but it’s doing basic stuff I needed like typing text.

If I needed Photoshop or something else I would use GNOME Boxes.

Ascend910,

Maybe try photopea?

negativeyoda,

Came to post this. I use photopea to do photo edits at work

garam,
@garam@lemmy.my.id avatar

When internet connection is great… photopea is… a viable alternative… sadly in 3rd world country, internet sucks… :'(

vsh,

It has very messy UI and it’s not intuitive for me

merthyr1831,

GIMP is beyond stale and it’s frustrating to see people recommend it as an “alternative” to Photoshop when it’s about as actively developed as X11. The fact it’s making rounds on FOSS news channels/sites because they ported the UI to GTK 3 (Which was replaced by GTK4 3 years ago now) is really a sign of how bad the project has gotten.

Photopea is a near feature-for-feature clone of Photoshop, designed around the superior UX and UI of photoshop, and all within a webapp that leverages hardware acceleration. All done by a single person. The downside is that it’s a proprietary webapp that costs money to use without ads clogging half the screen.

And you know what? I STILL prefer Photopea to GIMP, after using the latter for years. GIMP is old, slow, and pretty much dead in the water and I’m certain that they’d have produced 3.0 faster if someone had rewritten it over a weekend instead of trying to port the godawful mess of tech debt that must be going on inside the GIMP project atm.-

Photoshop getting better support via WINE/Proton is more likely than GIMP ever returning to its hay-day of being a true competitor to PS.

abuttifulpigeon,

Downside of Photopea is it’s not open-source (mainly because the creator needs ad revenue to run it, but I digress)

southernwolf,
@southernwolf@pawb.social avatar

I have to agree, Photopea really is the best alternative to PS for Linux users. It’s honestly good! I wish Affinity would consider launching a Linux Verizon, as I actually like that a lot more than PS, but that seems equally as unlikely…

So for now, Photopea seems the best option overall. One plus, being written in WASM (probably using Rust?) it’s really speedy and fast. It feels faster than Gimp anyways, which is definitely not a good statement on the state that Gimp is in…

michaelmrose,

Prompt move to GTK3 and now 4 adds very little value to gimp. Using it as benchmark is completely useless. If I understand correctly there are major changes happening under the hood and the effort may not have much effect until the work is finished.

erwan,

It looks like you already find what they alternatives are, but as you noticed they’re not Photoshop. They work differently so you’ll need to develop a different set of skills to used them.

If what you want is to use Photoshop, the best is to install Photoshop itself with Wine.

FoxAndKitten,

IDK if you can convince it to run on Linux, but I’ve been pretty happy with paint.net lately

It’s basically a newer project like gimp. It’s got the core abilities and appearance of Photoshop. Feature wise, it’s less than gimp or Photoshop, but what it has works decently well

Most importantly for me, the UX is much better than gimp… Not as good as Photoshop, but I find stuff is usually where I’d expect it to be

Obviously it’s built on .net, so theoretically it could run native on Linux… Not sure if anyone has done the work to make that actually happen

s20,

I used to love paint.net back in my Wod ows days. It’s a great middle ground between Paint and Photoshop, and if you only ever do light graphical work, it’s all you need.

If you want something like Paint.net but native to Linux, you should check out Pinta; I’ve used it for years. It’s not going to replace Photoshop, but then it’s not meant to be:

www.pinta-project.com

You can also find it on Flathub and the Snap store.

Diabolo96,

Have you tried playing with AI like stable diffusion ?

sLLiK,

One of the main reasons my wife hasn’t taken the Linux plunge is Photoshop support and a lack of feature-complete alternatives with sane UI design choices. We would gladly pay for a Linux version Photoshop.

It"s dawning on me now as I write this that Proton could be the secret sauce that slays this monster. Has anyone tried adding Photoshop as a non-Steam app to the Steam client, lately?

squidman64,

Proton is designed for games. Have you tried just using regular wine? I bet if you google “wine photoshop linux tutorial” tons of them will pop up

GnuLinuxDude,
@GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml avatar

I think one of the most insidious things about Photoshop is that it is a powerful, complex program. Using it is a skill. Which means that even if you think you are getting the better of Adobe by pirating their software, you are still building your own skills with their program, which is so full of features that classes can be taught about using it. In the end, that’s a win for Adobe and their proprietary software, because if you end up getting good enough to make money from that program, you will end up finding yourself in a position where you eventually pay them, or work for someone who does. This is to the detriment of any other photo editor, of course. You won’t care about how good GIMP or anything else is, much less fund it, because you won’t want to use it, because you know Photoshop.

If I had deep wallets I would love to start funding GIMP for development and rebranding. But I don’t have that kind of cash to push around :P

AnyOldName3,
@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve read that part of why GIMP is the way it is is because it’s meant to be a testbed for the GTK UI library, so features are added to use new UI elements as much as they are to aid photo manipulation, and in some cases it’s considered preferable to use a weird widget so it’s got a test case rather than whichever widget leads to the best UX. I don’t think I’ve ever looked for a more definitive source than a Lemmy/Reddit comment, but it’s at least consistent with my experience of using GIMP.

ExcessiveAardvark,

Gtk started as the Gimp Tool Kit but I don’t think there has been any real connection for ages. We’re taking about 1997 or something.

Hazdaz,

All the software developers will say “there’s GIMP” and then anyone who’s actually used GIMP will laugh in their face, amd now you see why so much of the open source community is such shit.

ScottE,

It depends on what you are doing, but there are lots of viable free alternatives. In addition to GIMP you mentioned, take a look at Darktable if you do photo editing. Any piece of complex software takes time to learn.

rglullis,
@rglullis@communick.news avatar

If not, why?

How many man-hours of work were already spent in the development of Photoshop, its plugins, etc? How much has that cost? On what scale of time was that spread around? How much money have designers put into them by buying licenses (now subscriptions) of Adobe’s suite?

If you want an alternative for Linux that can match Photoshop, you need to be willing to support the R&D costs that have been paid off by Adobe throughout the decades of its development. Are you willing to do it?

Aasikki,

What we really need is Photoshop in Linux. Yeah the free alternatives are super cool and definitely fine for lighter and more occasional use, but unfortunately I just don’t think they’ll ever be good for professional and more advanced hobby usage. I really fuckin hate adobe but at the same time Photoshop just is really good. We really do need a real competitor to Photoshop though, be it paid or free because Adobes business practices are getting ridiculously bad.

I’m super glad davinci resolve exists for video editing. Obviously not 100% feee and open source, but again it’s hard to believe a completely open solution could ever compete with adobes offering as well as davinci does. It’s both super nice to use, you can use it free or pay the imo very reasonable price for the professional license, which includes free upgrades for life! And wait, it also works on linux!! Almost unbelievable. I only wish it had h264 support on Linux for the free tier, but oh well… Nothing’s perfect :)

AphoticDev,
@AphoticDev@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

As Linux continues to rise in popularity, we might eventually see a Linux version. But unfortunately, most design firms use Macs, since Apple has put so much money into making them good for that, so there’s little incentive for Adobe to work on making Photoshop work under Linux, even using something like Wine.

Aasikki,

Exactly. And even though I absolutely love love love linux,it’s unfortunately just too unpractical for me to daily drive it on my main PC, as things like photoshop and 3D modeling software like fusion 360, are just too unstable on linux, despite the amazing efforts of projects like wine. They are pretty damn close and I’m sure they will eventually be perfect or at least almost so, but untill then I’ll have to run Windows on it (which I also don’t hate as much as some do, as I believe it also has its pros like the almost unparallel backwards compatibility, as we’ll as it’s negatives).

I also game and I’m so so happy that Linux is as close as it is to making gaming perfect on linux. I play like literally two games that eather didn’t work perfectly, or not at all on Linux, when I ran fedora on my main machine for over 6 months a few months back. It really is amazing what things like proton have done to Linux gaming.

I’ll keep occasionally trying how linux does for my main PC, and until I find it to be good enough for me I’ll keep running it on my home server and secondary laptop. Last time I tried it was damn close, I’m really expecting it to be only a couple years untill I move to linux as my main OS.

BaconIsAVeg,

Honestly, we’ll probably never see Photoshop on Linux with all the ‘value add’ crap they’re shoving in. I don’t even enjoy using it on Windows, and spent $35 on a lifetime Affinity Photo license when it was on sale.

I’d much rather see that ported tbh, especially since they wouldn’t need to port a ton of DRM services as well.

moonmeow,

I agree, affinity programs are really good and i’d rather see those on linux

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