One of the biggest problems with GIMP and Inkscape is how GTK renders numeric inputs. Look at the size of those +/- icons on the toolbar. For drawing software with lots of numeric inputs, that means an insane waste of space. Proprietary software like DaVinci and even Photopea have much smaller inputs, allowing them to create far more complex GUIs and featuring without cluttering the window.
A lot of these UIs were built around icons, following the direction MS Office took in the early 2000s. These once had colours and were somewhat distinguishable.
When they tried to jump on newer trends they made them all monochrome, and they don't have distinctive sillouettes so it's just completely inscrutable. That Inkscape screenshot is horrible. I count 129 icons.
And yet they still devote so much space to their bizarre colour palette, which is huge but still manages to omit most of the gamut? It's the kind of design that really only comes from decades of OSS development.
I just want to be able to crop and draw on top of images. Like old Paint. That is literally all I want to ever do with images. What should I use in Linux for this purpose
Photocraft has been working alright for me. I really struggled to learn GIMP, and I haven't found any easy lightweight image editing tool that replaces Paint.NET for me before trying Photocraft. It's still a little confusing since I'm not used to photoshop-like bindings and layout, but it hasn't been too hard to adjust. (I also only ever use it for small simple edits, drawing, cropping, color gradients, background removal, etc.)
I easily modified pinta to do exactly this. You mean overlay, right? It can overlay, draw, manipulate, and I added a better file navigator so I can see which imagery I want to overlay to begin with. My use case was scientific in nature. What is yours, if you don’t mind my asking?
Inkscape is actually one of the few FOSS apps that is actually pretty intuitive to use. In fact, way back when I first started using vector design tools, I found it more intuitive/had better feedback than Illustrator (same thing can't be said about GIMP vs Photoshop). Inkscape really is great, but I have one huge gripe: I'm sure there's a system to it, but the file export name never stays what I want it to be...
People are confusing UX with UI. Inkscape UX might be better for many people but it would be hard to argue that Inkscape UI is better - it got better recently but it's still far from blender polish.
I'm surprised how much everyone's opinions differ in this thread. I've always found blender's UI incredible but inkscape's awful (though nowhere near as bad as gimp)
A side by side screenshot of inkscape/gimp/blender for those who don't have them installed
https://cleanshot.com/share/WW9yFdMy
One of the biggest problems with GIMP and Inkscape is how GTK renders numeric inputs. Look at the size of those +/- icons on the toolbar. For drawing software with lots of numeric inputs, that means an insane waste of space. Proprietary software like DaVinci and even Photopea have much smaller inputs, allowing them to create far more complex GUIs and featuring without cluttering the window.
Tbh, you could summarise a lot of the issues with their UI as "GTK"
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A lot of these UIs were built around icons, following the direction MS Office took in the early 2000s. These once had colours and were somewhat distinguishable.
When they tried to jump on newer trends they made them all monochrome, and they don't have distinctive sillouettes so it's just completely inscrutable. That Inkscape screenshot is horrible. I count 129 icons.
And yet they still devote so much space to their bizarre colour palette, which is huge but still manages to omit most of the gamut? It's the kind of design that really only comes from decades of OSS development.
It's just pointless to port GIMP over at this stage, you may as well do a greenfield project without the cultural baggage and poor foundations.
I just want to be able to crop and draw on top of images. Like old Paint. That is literally all I want to ever do with images. What should I use in Linux for this purpose
Perhaps Gradia [0], Pinta [1], or Krita [2].
[0]: https://gradia.alexandervanhee.be/ [1]: https://www.pinta-project.com/ [2]: https://krita.org/en/
Thanks for mentioning gradia. That seems perfect actually
Photocraft has been working alright for me. I really struggled to learn GIMP, and I haven't found any easy lightweight image editing tool that replaces Paint.NET for me before trying Photocraft. It's still a little confusing since I'm not used to photoshop-like bindings and layout, but it hasn't been too hard to adjust. (I also only ever use it for small simple edits, drawing, cropping, color gradients, background removal, etc.)
There is paint.rs[0] as well which is intended to be paint.net open source alternative which works on Linux.
I’d be interested to know what you think about it
[0]: https://github.com/daijro/paint.rs
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I easily modified pinta to do exactly this. You mean overlay, right? It can overlay, draw, manipulate, and I added a better file navigator so I can see which imagery I want to overlay to begin with. My use case was scientific in nature. What is yours, if you don’t mind my asking?
Use KolourPaint, it's a windows 9x/XP paintbrush clone with only a few improvements tacked on.
https://photoflare.io/ is the one I've found to be most usable. Pinta is just unpleasant to use at high resolutions and it's buggy.
IrfanView in Wine, f12 opens a really old-school paint toolbox.
GIMP of course.
KPaint
[dead]
De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum.
Gustus est sicut nates - divisus est.
lorem ipsum
Lol ;)
expecto patronum
vel adrogantia
This feels like those AI models suddenly switching to Chinese mid-conversation
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cum emptore
and then rename it blimp
Fantastic is the last word I would use the describe blenders UI/UX.
Inkscape’s UI is much, much better than Blender’s, IMO.
Inkscape is actually one of the few FOSS apps that is actually pretty intuitive to use. In fact, way back when I first started using vector design tools, I found it more intuitive/had better feedback than Illustrator (same thing can't be said about GIMP vs Photoshop). Inkscape really is great, but I have one huge gripe: I'm sure there's a system to it, but the file export name never stays what I want it to be...
Weird, I find it to be an unscrutable turd
People are confusing UX with UI. Inkscape UX might be better for many people but it would be hard to argue that Inkscape UI is better - it got better recently but it's still far from blender polish.
I'm surprised how much everyone's opinions differ in this thread. I've always found blender's UI incredible but inkscape's awful (though nowhere near as bad as gimp)
These complex tools are "intuitive" to whoever uses them the most
With a much simpler set of tasks to accomplish.
They are completely incomparable applications.