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My list is a bit different:
Photoshop ➡️ Krita Illustrator ➡️ Krita After Effects ➡️ Blender Premier Pro ➡️ kdenlive Adobe XD and Figma ➡️ Everything about these tools seems wrong to me (see comment below) Cinema 4D and 3DS Max ➡️ I thought everyone ditched those in favor of Blender long ago? LOL
I completely do not understand the appeal of tools like Figma. As a developer who’s made lot of single page web applications (though not in a while… Maybe everything is different now? 🤷) tools like Figma seem like they’d create a major headache for developers.
I mean, sure: If a tool gives you a quick, easy, collaborative way to mock up a website and user interactions then by all means! But it looks like people are going far beyond that and using Figma to generate code. In my experience with such tools in the past, that’s where everything goes wrong.
If the developers themselves aren’t using the tool then the code will drift from the GUI design tool too much over time, becoming a boat anchor that holds development back and slows everything down. But maybe folks are just using it to get things started? I dunno. I just don’t get the hype around it.
Then again, I’m a guy who does all his CAD design work in OpenSCAD so I might have something like a superpower in regards to visual reasoning that prevents me from understanding the issues others have with conceptualizing code-as-design 🤷
I’ve seen Figma provide CSS values but I think it’s main purpose is designers can use it to create UX specs that devs can then implement. It’s definitely more convenient to make mocks in than using HTML and CSS directly. It also seems more popular than the Adobe option but it’s also super not free
Gimp is good. I don’t know what gimp haters are always so mad about. The buttons are in different places than in photoshop, big whoop. I have been able to do everything I’ve ever attempted in gimp and I do modding and game development. I just don’t get it.
what the gimp haters are always so mad about
You have to use a plugin to even draw a circle properly.
You can’t make non-destructive changes to things like filtered elements e.g. make blurred/outlined/etc. text and then change the text.
Content-aware functions
big whoop
Just how different it is from Photoshop is literally the biggest complaint people have. And that it’s just unintuitive to many even if you never used photoshop. For gimp to propel in popularity I think it has to become more familiar to what professionals are used to.
You have to use a plugin to even draw a circle properly.
How so? I’ve used GIMP to draw plenty of circles without any plugins.
I hate both Gimp and Krita, but I prefer Krita.
Ultimately, drawing freeware just feels bad to use.
Figma and blender are good the rest you’re better off with the paid
How about the iinux version of AutoCAD?
As a mechanical engineer - there is no serviceable free CAD. The only thing you can hope for is Linux compatibility - and you have 100% of that with Onshape only (cloud based).
Freecad is getting more and more attention. When version 1.0 releases (soon), it will be something worth checking out, but there is still work to do.
InDesign had those text boxes that you could link to the next text box with the little red plus, and the words would flow back and forth. It’s the only thing in all of the Adobe Creative Suite that I miss! FUCK ADOBE, GIMP FOR LIFE!
I suspect they use a different definition of “Free” than we are used to. DaVinci Resolve and Figma are not FOSS, and have free and paid levels.
I believe the others are all free (as in beer) as well as free (as in speech).
Yea, Shotcut should be there.
Yup, I’d also say darktable + krita is a far better solution than gimp.
That said, for pro level stuff, resolve is much better than premier in general, so it’s a solid competitor from a “Linux support” category.
Calling Figma free is like calling complimentary bread sticks a full dinner.
Penpot would be a better alternative. I never used it but it’s gaining momentum.
It’s infuriating what basic features Penpot is still lacking and it trips you up all the time if you’re used to working with Figma, but what’s already in feels pretty good.
Yeah I pay Figma way too much every month for my team holy hell.
This is free as in free beer.
Photopea is another good (entirely browser-based) Photoshop alternative.
This is infinitely better than gimp if all you care about is that it’s free as in beer.
As a former Photoshop user, I found all the paradigms and ways of thinking in Gimp were just so utterly different from what I was used to. Simple things like cropping, resizing selections and layer management felt like exercises in frustration.
Tried Krita instead, and I’m immediately feeling at home and able to be productive straight away.
I’m sure Gimp is awesome but my brain didn’t like it. If anyone else is feeling the same way, give Krita a try.
I’ve used both Gimp and Photoshop. I’m not super skilled in any of these, but Photoshop feels the most natural to use. I’ve never figured out a good workflow for Gimp.
It’s a shame, because functionality wise Gimp is quite competent. It’s just the UI that’s crap.
It is not just you. I started using gimp and later switched to Photoshop and it was such a great productivity improvement after just a few minutes.
Try Krita too then, if you’re interested in moving to free and open source. The paradigm is very similar to Photoshop.
Krita took some adjustment for me after years of Photoshop. After I learned the workflow and keyboard shortcuts, I found that it was much better than Photoshop for painting AND completely free for life.
The fact that it’s much hyped as a painting tool was actually the reason I didn’t start using Krita earlier. Felt like it was only for artists and I’m thinking “I’m not an artist, just need to do some image manipulation” but actually, it’s fine for that too :)
That’s the weird thing about Krita: It was originally made to be a photo editor but they somehow turned it into one of the best painting tools! But there’s more!
Krita is also fantastic for vector graphics! It’s missing some of the “lower layer” features of Inkscape (e.g. metadata stuff and fine control over the generated XML/text data) but those are quickly remedied by opening your Krita-generated SVG in Inkscape for a few seconds to make the (subtle) changes you want and using it’s powerful export features.
What’s interesting is that if you do that and re-open said SVG in Krita they’ll be preserved and stay as such if you continue to modify the image. The devs did a fantastic job at that sort of thing (which, as a dev myself I know can be really hard to pull off: When you save it’s all too easy to just regenerate everything from scratch and overwrite the entire file with a completely new version, losing anything that your file exporter doesn’t normally deal with).
If I can’t do it in emacs, I do it in Blender.
Photopea would be a better drop in than Gimp. But it’s a website and that grinds my gears.
It loads completely in the browser. iirc you could disable your network after loading the “website” and it would continue to work. Simply a web app, if you will
Trying to learn how to use Natron felt impossible. It’s a very different approach to what it does and I could not even start to figure it out.
Every comment in this thread from beehaw is extremely negative.
Yeah they are, wtf is happening over there?
From what I see there are literally just two people from beehaw here.
But the guy that says Gimp sucks is right, I tried it and it feels so awful and awkward to use. I commend the attempt, but I am not going to use it. And wouldn’t expect s high retention rate for any artists referred to it. Maybe it’s okay for pixel artists. Idk.
Krita is better for me, but still not good.
My pirated copy of Photoshop was lost after I forgot to back it up before I formatted my PC, went without it for a while because I couldn’t find another one. Ended up trying Gimp and Krita and an older version of Photoshop, used the old Photoshop occasionally but lost that one as well when my hard drive failed. Now I have Krita installed, but in general I just basically stopped drawing. It’s not fucking fun and it just feels so wrong. I’ve been trying to find decent brushes that work with my Intuous pressure thing but idk, none of it is good. I think there was one “ink” brush that sort of worked.
For Krita I cant even figure out how to move around the canvas without reaching for the mouse. I used to hold a pen button and drag around. Hold Z and the same pen button to zoom in and out. Idk how to do it anymore so every single change in zoom or location feels awkward.
“These programs suck because I’m used to different programs.”
No, these programs suck because they have bad UI. Gimp’s “editable number in front of a slider that behaves differently based on where you touch it first” is the single worst control I’ve encountered in years.
They suck.
Lol Free Software?
