I can recommend PhotoGIMP which makes GIMP UI fairly close to Ps.
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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The first item on your list should have been to try Gimp ?
I'll add that you can't just "try" gimp really, you'll have to learn some new workflows for sure, but yeah, should've been top of the list, it's THE alternative.
GIMP and Krita are aimed at Photoshop, while RawTherapee and Darktable are aimed at Lightroom, and Inkscape is aimed at Illustrator.
Krita is aimed at Clip Studio Paint. It's not great for quickly editing something.
Rawtherapee is really fucking good, I used it on Windows before discovering Linux
But their hands are shaking too much, so they aim, but at the wrong things. I wish any of them could find some UX designers. I forgot about the text editing in Krita, that was horrible indeed.
I made/maintain a UI-style from scratch for Inkscape, if anyone is interested. It addresses various UI issues
That looks much better, I’m going to try it, thanks for sharing!
nice, feel free to give any feedback if you have any problems with it.
Hey, I tried it. Is it only themes in the settings, or should I do something else. The interface became a bit more aesthetically appealing, so a nice work on that regard. But my pain point is the panels and their very weird behaviour (like you do resize and they are too much all the time). I expect you cannot address that with a theme.
I’m going to keep it, so I may comment more some days / weeks later, if you will.
Yes, this is “surface level” styling as a theme. It targets Inkscape-specific widgets as much as possible, which improves things considerably. It does not change Inkscape beyond the styling level
If you could explain your panel issue in more detail (I don’t understand what you meant exactly) and if there isn’t already, it would be good to submit it as a issue to Inkscape directly
I like the UI of Krita. Gimp is... Uh... Gimp. But Krita is certainly a modern drawing program.
Gimp's latest version is much cleaner and a way smoother experience. I'm actually really excited about it. :)
Totally agreed on Krita. It's a joy to use. My drawing and painting could certainly be better, but I definitely don't feel like the software is what's holding me back!
Last time I used it, it wasn’t ready for a Retina HiDPI screen (MacBooks since 2013), but I might want to double-check that. I remember the icons were pixelated. And I’m very sure it did not work on Wayland, which generates a bunch of weird bugs / issues for a multi-monitor setup. I never work with just one display. So, I can use it when I have to, but most times I prefer Gimp. Haven’t been opening Krita for over a year or so. Text editing is a gimp too. Apart from that, the interface wasn’t that bad as it is with Gimp, that’s for sure. Overall, I believe that’s actually a pretty nice program, Krita.
Well, I use an XP Pen display tablet, so effectively a second monitor. I've used both Krita on Ubuntu using X11 (in 2024 and before) and since the start of 2025 been using Bazzite which uses Wayland.
Can't say I've run into any display specific issues. Pen tracking gave me some trouble, but it was some setting in KDE and Open Tablet Driver I had to play with to fix that.
My issue was that when run through XWayland, Krita would work only on the primary display (no concept of that in Wayland) with 0,0 coordinates. So, if I’m on a laptop, it would work only on the primary (laptop) screen, but not the external one. I have a script that reorganises my workspaces and makes the external display the primary one, then runs Krita. But it would never work on any other display, if I wanted to use that too, for some multi monitor setup.
I may want to try that again, perhaps that was some bug that was fixed. But I’m surely not going to use X instead of Wayland for Krita.
Interesting. I've never experienced this. Back when Wayland wasn't even considered as a main display server yet there were problems with resolution scaling and desktop sizes, but... Straight up not working?
Hmm... But what do you mean with it doesn't work? How doesn't/didn't it work? What prevented you from, say, opening Krita and just dragging the window to the monitor you want?
The window is unresponsive to clicks, so the mouse never works. You can drag it to the main laptop’s screen, but my laptop is small and the external screen is big, so it’s not useful to have such an app opened on a tiny screen. There are workarounds, but having a native Wayland app is just much more useful than hacking around. Last time I checked (was quite a long time ago, up to a year ago) the development wasn’t too focused on Wayland. I hope they’d do at some point, as overall Krita is good.
Were you using a desktop environment or wm setup? Been drawing with Krita on KDE Wayland every day for two years without any of these issues. Also on M1 and M2 Macs without issues.
Well, for image manipulation, I can only think of GIMP as I have been using it for close to 2 decades. But because I have barely scratched the surface of what you can do with it, I don't know if it would be a suitable replacement for your use-case. Also of note, its UI is definitely not a one-to-one reproduction of Photoshop's, so it will require some getting used to.
There's a github project called PhotoGIMP that makes the GIMP UI feel a lot like photoshop, aimed at transitioning users.
Edit: here
Interesting, thanks guy's!
There are ways to bypass some of the issues. But for me, what works the best, is to get used to use the tool that fits the job best, and sometimes that's two or three tools for the same project. It's exactly if I do some woodwork (carpenter work), I might use both a saw, a hammer, a chisel, a drill and a screwdriver... It really doesn't bother me, to use more apps to create something I'm satisfied with. :-)
Inkscape, Gimp, Krita is my most used apps on Linux... :-) On SloWindows it's mostly Inkscape and Affinity...
Photo editing: darktable
Digital Art: Krita
Illustrator type stuff: Inkscape
Pain: Gimp. although the PhotoGIMP plugin makes it bearable.
OR wait for the recent wine patch to mature a bit more and then you can literally just use Photoshop.
Since no one else has said it... Pixelorama is somewhat focused on making pixel art and animations, but it's great at what it does.
Pinta is pretty decent for some things, like a paint.net for Linux.
I was just getting ready to ask. I've been a paint.net user for years, gets me by well enough anytime I need it. Switching to Linux, I found GIMP way too annoying for my liking.
Might try this out or figure out how to run Paint.net on Linux.
As someone already pointed out, try to increase font size first.
I personally use a Vector layer and put text there (not sure if it even works in paint layer). For making it bigger you can then just grab the corner with Select Shapes Tool and resize it. If it doesn't work, enable Scale Styles in the Tool Options docker.
GIMP, but you definitely should install also the GMIC and resynthesiser plugins. With GMIC especially, you're getting so many things that not even Photoshop can do, making GIMP objectively superior.
Edit: If you mean you're looking for a raw editor, meaning you change the colors and how the image themselves look, then you need Darktable. This is a raw editor. GIMP is mainly for VFX.
What do personally use G'MIC for?
The example screenshots all look gimmicky (heh) or super advanced scientific image processing.
I guess noise reduction is useful to the average user. Depends on how good it is.
Two of my favourite ones are median and montage. One I use for mood boards, the other one is to get rid of either noise or people in images.
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Krita is what I use but I also find text handling difficult so I always do text last.
What are you doing with photoshop? If it's mostly photo editing, it's darktable that you're looking for.
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Personally I use GIMP. Been my photoshop replacement for at least a good 5ish years now, and it's come a long way! It has (imo) a pretty intuitive interface so it doesn't take too long to acclimate.
Affinity
Someone just recently managed to get it going.
I have been looking at Affinity as a sub for InDesign. I have never actually tried it though. Does it work on Linux?
I dropped Adobe a few years ago, I do love inscape, however yeh it has limitations, gimp for photos. Not found anything to good with text. Been back and forward with Scribus but it’s just so awkward.
I used Affinity on Mac and Windows. It was the affordable, well-thought-out, performant Photoshop competitor and is now free to use (with a Canva account). Some folks got it running with wine and there is an easy to use appimage ( see articlke )/
I got it running easily, but didn't test it fully, yet.
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I started using Krita, which is amazing and does lots of things I do, but the text editor when I try to resize text, it just ruins it and gets blurry sometimes. Then I found inkscape, which was good for, text and everything else worked fine, but not much of photo editor.
Inkscape is like Adobe illustrator. It's for vector graphics and text. it's not great for photos/pictures/pixelated things. Like, you can add those as objects to a document. But you want to edit the images somewhere else. Maybe a krita --> inkscape workflow could work for you?
I also use kdenlive for video editing, and rawtherapee for DSLR photos editing.
I recommend trying to play around with blender for more specialized video editing. Like, if you want to add complex effects, or motion track/stabilize, whatever. It's an extremely powerful piece of software (best to look at tutorials, idk if anyone can figure that shit out on their own). All I've done with it is stabilize some video (which I then used in a kdenlive project), and I absolutely haven't even scratched the surface.
People sleep on Blender's "VSE" capabilities so much. I feel like an extension to make it a little bit more turnkey like Kadenlive could be helpful, but it's a VERY good video editor and I think few users really know how much it can do in that realm.
Last time I did Krita ----> inkspace, not much hassle. I know Blender, I didn't know that it could do video editing.
Ive never used it so I cant vest for its quality but I have heard Photopea as an alternative for Photoshop in the past. It being webbased shohld also mean that it will work well on linux
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Gimp and Darktable should do the trick !
the text editor when I try to resize text, it just ruins it and gets blurry sometimes.
I dunno what you're doing but... When you resize text, you usually want to select the text and increase the font size. Sometimes you can render to vector and resize that. But if you resize the text as pixels, then it'll probably look bad. Generally I try not to render text to pixels or do that last if necessary.
From what I know you'll have to compose with a mix of Krita GIMP and Inkscape because those are the three most reliable and feature rich FOSS image editors at this time. In the current capitalist mode of production, free software will hardly be on the level of paid software, however enshittified, because of how many devs get to work full time on it.
Keep in mind that I say this while operating fully on a FOSS environment, because the relative increase in features and reliability doesn't justify going from free to an absurdly high subscription
I know you said "alternatives to Photoshop" but if you don't find any, this video shows that you can run Photoshop on Linux now. Try it and see if it works for you
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