De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum.

vel adrogantia

This feels like those AI models suddenly switching to Chinese mid-conversation

This entire thread caught me off guard lmao

Gustus est sicut nates - divisus est.

cum emptore

lorem ipsum

Lol ;)

expecto patronum

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

With a much simpler set of tasks to accomplish.

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

They are completely incomparable applications.

and then rename it blimp

Fantastic is the last word I would use the describe blenders UI/UX.

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"

GIMP is far from a nice example of what GTK can do…

For sure, which is ironic given it was the application GTK was created to support. But even so, I don't think I've ever really seen a GTK-based application I actually liked (the rest of the UI is going to have to make up for the atrocious file picking dialog, for example)

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

GIMP of course.

KPaint

Use KolourPaint, it's a windows 9x/XP paintbrush clone with only a few improvements tacked on.

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

I wish people would stop naming software after the implementation language.

Thank you for showing me this!

I tried it out, and it's a pretty good clone. It serves my muscle memory well, with a few hiccups like drag-and-drop image onto the window doesn't work exactly the same, the save menu is a bit different. But there are also some pretty good improvements, like the addition of text layers (text got rasterized immediately after loosing focus in paint.NET which made it HORRIBLE to work with. This change is super welcome). There are also a bunch of new "plus" menu items that it seemingly gets from PhotoCraft? Not sure if that's because I have PhotoCraft installed, or if it comes with those features bundled. I'm not sure how good this is, because Paint.NET menus were already quite bloated and confusing to navigate, so this makes them even more cluttered with for example "Hue / Saturation" next to "Hue / Saturation +". The UI windows can't be dragged out of the paint.rs window like they could in Paint.NET. I think this is also faster than Paint.NET was.

I like this, it's quite good. I would like a more modern UI though, ideally using native GTK elements. Though that raises and interesting question of how much should a re-implementation veer away from the original. I think I'll keep this as a backup if I get fed up with PhotoCraft.

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

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?

IrfanView in Wine, f12 opens a really old-school paint toolbox.

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.

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.