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Please support this! As graphic designers we should be able to use a open source OS.
(www.change.org)
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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I'm a professional graphic designer and I will never EVER support any initiative trying to get privative support into Linux and this kind of shitty mindset from colleagues actually irks me. I will support any initiative trying to improve what we already have. You don't even need to be a developer nor donate money to help - bug reports and translations are also a thing. That's how we got to get high quality software like Krita, Inkscape or Blender.
Can I ask your perspective on the comments here saying that Krita and Inkscape just aren't comparable to their commercial alternatives?
The reason is... I'm not a professional graphic designer, I have a small consultancy with several staff and work with documents and spreadsheets all day.
Occasionally I encounter similar threads discussing the difference between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, and the comments are all the same. So many people saying LibreOffice just "isn't there yet", or that it might be ok for casual use but not for power users.
But as someone who uses LibreOffice extensively with a broad feature set I've just never encountered something we couldn't do. Sure we might work around some rough edges occasionally, but the feature set is clearly comparable.
My strongly held suspicion is that it's a form of the dunning-kruger effect. People have a lot of experience using software-A so much so that they tend to overlook just how much skill and knowledge they have accumulated with that specific software. Then when they try software-B they misconstrue their lack of knowledge with that specific software as complexity.
I am a professional and have been doing this since... Well, I started with Mac OS 7, let's put it that way. Krita and Inkscape are like using craft scissors to cut sheetmetal. They're simply the wrong tool for the job. They are maybe 10% comparable to Adobe apps. Affinity apps are probably 60% or 70% comparable. Anybody who says Inkscape is a replacement for Illustrator simply does not use it in any serious professional capacity. It doesn't even have any means of adding paragraph spacing!
That's sort of where I see the issue as well. What proprietary software does is takes the features of a bunch of different pieces of kit and puts them together into one package.
There isn't one particular thing that Propietary software does the FOSS software can't. The problem is that you need multiple different software solutions to do it.
So while Illustrator offers Paragraph Spacing (for example) Inkscape doesn't, you get that in Scribus. But Scribus lacks the more advanced pathing vector tools, which Inkscape offers. Meanwhile neither of them have strong photo editing abilities, which GIMP brings to the table, but GIMP can't really do painting well, which KRITA brings to the table...and so on and so on.
Every open source alternative does something as good as their proprietary alternaties. But not everything. You have to use a combination in order to match the capability of one adobe product, and that's just not feasible in a professional environment.
Even that isn't really true. GIMP for example is nowhere near feature parity with Photoshop, not even close. it only just got non-desctructive editing a few months ago, something that Photoshop has had for at least 20 years if not more! The disparity gets much, much worse when you look at filters or tools like content-aware fill.
Yeah. That's exactly my point....maybe I wasn't clear.
The problem is that no one specific FOSS tool has feature parity. To get the same abilities as Photoshop, you have to use a workflow that is a combination of GIMP, Inkscape, Krita and Scribus instead of having it in the one package, which is why Adobe is the industry standard.
No, what I'm saying is that PS has features that simply do not exist in any of the current FOSS apps. How do you replicate smart objects or content-aware fill? How about sky replacement or the camera RAW filter?