It is really a shame how far behind Gimpo has fallen. I attribute it largely to the mess the GEGL transition caused.

Remember Gimp --> GTK? And Gimp is still limping on Gtk2 and blurry on each and every scaled Wayland installation.

Yup - it turns out pulling out the core of your graphics in a graphics programme can take a lot of time to get right (certainly took years in my own small project).

Who knows, maybe GIMP will jump straight to Gtk4.

There's a good roundup of happenings in 2017 in GIMP here:

https://www.gimp.org/news/2017/12/31/gimp-and-gegl-in-2017/

[EDIT] There are links in the above doc to sponsor GEGL developers [/EDIT]

It's encouraging that GEGL is seeing use in other projects and receiving patches, maybe the GEGLisation isn't too far from completion.

They just need to do a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign like Krita did, and hire a full time developers to those money. I bet they would be able to success.

Oh well, despite of everything we said and wrote about kickstarters, people still post this :)

We are simply not in a position to do centralized crowdfunding.

Couldn't a competent developer just ask for direct funding from a Kickstarter campaign? No need for any central authority really.

You can build the gtk3 dev branch of gimp and it does kinda work :D

meanwhile Krita: "We can probably postpone worrying about Wayland on Linux for another year" https://krita.org/en/about/krita-roadmap-2017-2019/ >_<

Krita puts a heroic effort into bug workarounds for faulty graphic tablet drivers. Porting to Wayland/libinput will be very much nontrivial for them. They're guaranteed to run into Qt and KDElibs bugs as well. At a minimum, they should wait until Plasma is Wayland by default. Otherwise they're just slogging into a buggy mess.

Just from someone who has dug too deep trying to figure out what it would take to make this happen, KWin on Wayland right now does not support graphics tablets at all. It needs to be wired up to support them still. And we still don't have a Wayland input KCM, but I think someone is working on that for 5.13. I think.

That being said, I have a Monoprice tablet I use through libinput. I used the wacom driver for a bit but libinput gives me enough to do what I want (I have to say having to do matrix math to constrain the screen size so the tablet is in 1 to 1 correlation to the screen was a bit rough on the UX front). Libinput is pretty feature complete on tablet support in the basic use cases, it is just missing a bunch of the tunables from xsetwacom. The Digimend project has done an amazing job providing driver support for a lot of non-wacom tablets as well. It will be interesting if its Wacom tablets that are the pain point on Wayland. I don't have or know anyone with one to confirm or deny if the libinput support is up to par.

If I had the confidence to know what I'm doing (and I don't, I've never touched the Kwin / Wayland / input stacks on Linux at all) I'd try wiring in tablets to Kwin, but you probably want that first - which is still at least a release or two out at best - before you even think about trying to port your KDE Painting app to Wayland.

But I don't use it for painting with a tablet! I just want to crop screenshots and draw arrows on them. On a HiDPI screen, without the whole app being blurry.

Why not provide a --no-tablets-i-just-want-wayland option that would not force the X backend?

Because that would be a very silly thing to spend time on? Time taken away from working on things that Krita is meant for?

X11 is a silly thing to spend time on :P

So turns out it's easy to turn off X11 in the build files https://github.com/myfreeweb/krita-wayland/commit/8ab43e3e1c... and it does work on Wayland now!

Exactly -- I couldn't have put it better :-)

I've recently taken up drawing and animation as a hobby. I found Gimp to be perfect for what I need. It has good support for my drawing tablet. I didn't find it hard to use at all and I see the fact that the interface isn't completely revamped every 6 months as a benefit. Once I figured it out, the plug-in infrastructure is wonderful and allows me to script a lot of stuff in Python.

How does Krita compare to Photoshop? I use Photoshop Elements 15, which does for me almost all I need. If you go to Expert mode, it's almost like Photoshop CS2 or CS4, except for the bad UI, and I'm sure there are features in CS4 that are missing but that I don't use.

If Krita can replace Photoshop for the most part, it's a good alternative on Linux.

Krita is centered around digital illustration and painting. It can't really compete with Photoshop's advanced computer vision features like healing brush, quick selection tool and 3d panorama editing. But if you just need to do some color correction and light airbrushing, it can be used instead of Photoshop.

Also, if you can put up with the UI for the plugin, the G'MIC filters contain some cool stuff. You can do frequency separation and content aware fill.