Krita
Free digital painting studio built for artists, with a large brush engine and good drawing tablet support.
Our verdict
Krita replaces the drawing side of what you might have used Photoshop, Clip Studio or Corel Painter for. If you sketch, paint or ink with a graphics tablet, this is the strongest free tool on Linux and one of the few Linux apps that is simply better than most of its paid rivals.
A Wacom or similar tablet usually works the moment it is plugged in, with pressure and tilt recognised. Brush behaviour, stabilisers, layer groups and masks are all present, and there is a simple animation timeline if you want to move into short loops.
What it is not is a photo editor. Cropping a holiday photo or removing a blemish is awkward here compared with GIMP. The Krita team offer their own standalone AppImage download. The Flathub listing is community maintained, which is worth knowing if a version ever lags behind.
What's good
- Brush engine and pressure sensitivity that stand up against paid painting apps
- Drawing tablets generally work as soon as you plug them in
- Opens Photoshop .psd files and has its own frame-by-frame animation tools
- Free from the project's own site, with no trial period
What to know first
- Built for painting, not for photo correction or fixing family snapshots
- Heavy on memory with large canvases
- The Flathub build is community maintained rather than published by the Krita team
- Colour management for print is limited
The details
- Cost
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (GPL-3.0)
- How you install it
- App store (Flatpak), AppImage download, App store (Snap), Built-in app store
Windows apps it can replace
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