I'm sure this will get some flak from the "less than enthusiastic about Mono" crowd. Me on the other hand, I'm ecstatic to see this sort of tool on *nix. We've needed a good, simpler alternative to the Gimp for a long time now and if Pinta's anywhere near as good as it's inspiration it'll fit the bill nicely.

I tried Krita... slower than molasses. I liked the UI and features, but wow was it sluggish.

Krita now has got amazingly smooth and stable canvas rotation and mirroring. Many new brush engines, like a hatching and a sketching brush. Support for ABR brush files. A complete new transform tool that can do ordinary transforms as well as freeform warping. The very-nearly-best color selector in the world -- check that configuration pane and make it uniquely yours, to fit your style of working. Incredible improvements to the pixel brush. An new multi-threaded display engine. Brush outlines. Swapping to disk in low-memory situations. Presets! You can now save your brush designs -- and for those brush engines that we won't mark as experimental, that's future proof. Gradients that follow your current color selection. Usability improvements like pan with middle-mouse-button and zoom with the scroll wheel. And much more.

And finally performance, performance, performance and stability -- and performance. And hundreds of bug fixes. Of course -- improvements are still possible. But give Krita a whirl and experience the improvement we've reached!

"The Krita project decided to focus on developing a painting application (as opposed to a general-purpose raster image editor or a photo-retouching tool, for example)." So if you want to re-touch photographs, Krita is not the tool, use digikam or GIMP for that. Krita is for painting.

I'll check it out again... I've been looking for a good painting program on Linux (GIMP definitely is not it).

I wish Autodesk ported Sketchbook Designer to Linux.

... because as of right now, Pinta doesn't even get to the starting gate compared to Krita.

"... because as of right now, Pinta doesn't even get to the starting gate compared to Krita.

Version 2.3 release

Krita 2.3 (code named Chagall) was released on 30 December 2010 with 1120 updates. Chagall was notable for being the first KDE4 based release stated as being "ready for end users". It included new brushes such as the sketch and hatching brush, a transform / shear tool, a grid based warp tool and a new color space aware color selector which introduced a range of selector shapes, last used colors swatches, automatic color variant swatches (eg complimentary colors, triads, contrasting colors etc). Chagall included speed increases such as a 400% increase in performance of the standard autobrush tool as well as pervasive multithreading. 299 bugs were also closed over version 2.2. Navigation enhancements included a stylus / middle mouse button only pan and zoom, openGl based, lossless canvas rotation and an on canvas draggable brush size.

Future Development

Krita 2.4 is currently in development, with planned features including: Realistic simulation of paint color mixing, use of MyPaint brushes, a stable version of Krita for the Microsoft Windows operating systems, pervasive hotkeys, OpenCL, GPU hardware acceleration and further speed and stability optimizations.

However, in this particular, it transpires that you aren't out-of-date. A stable version of Krita for Windows is not planned until version 2.4.

"However, in this particular, it transpires that you aren't out-of-date. A stable version of Krita for Windows is not planned until version 2.4.

Now any clone of a shitty Windows software is news just because it runs on Linux / Os X / whatever? Or it's news because it's the first shitty painting software done with C# and GTK?

What's the fcking news? Did Adobe port Photoshop on Linux, or what? And what's wrong with Paint.net? It runs on Linux too, and is better than this.

Krita is for painting

Paint.NET is so user friendly that they use it in Primary Schools for kids to do artwork on. I use it a lot when cutting up website designs I don't get in PSD format. It is incredibly fast and easy to use and runs well on even modest hardware. That is why Paint.NET is so damn good. Having something similar on nix would make my life a lot easier when developing PHP or Rails Websites.

"Coming soon" features is of no use to him.

""Coming soon" features is of no use to him.

Right... yes, if all that was involved with Comic Creation was drawing, Krita would be a useful tool. But that misses pretty much all of the functionality I use in Manga Studio. I draw by hand (usually pencil, sometimes also ink... how very last century of me!), Scan, digitally ink (if I didn't already ink by hand) then Screentone (doesn't do this - if you think it does, you don't understand what that means), add any effects (doesn't do this) and add speech bubbles (doesn't do this either.) So, at best it does less than half of what I need, plus if I drew everything manually, it actually then does zero. This is then completely ignoring the other things it does, such as panelling and page management.

Screen toning aside, I don't really see much of an argument as to why Manga Studio is SO superior to either GIMP or Paint.NET.

And yes, I also produce digital content occasionally - used to draw on a daily basis a few years ago, not so much today - so I am not talking out of my ass.

Manga Studio is a very nice application, yes, whose interface is primarily directed to those that want to create comics that look like manga,

hence the effects, speed lines,

speech bubbles,

but unsurprisingly it is not as used on professional environments as you are seemingly implying to be.

Most professional comic books are usually drawn on paper and inked manually to be scanned and then colored/tweaked/etc on Photoshop (although many creators are increasingly doing the entire workflow digitally these days).

Dialogs are usually put either directly on Photoshop or using a vector app such as Illustrator (which is much better at rearranging speech bubbles than any raster app anyway!).

Speed lines and other effects can be created easily on Photoshop. Laying out a page is also easily done on these tools so I fail to see what Manga Studio has that put it a cut above most of those other tools.

Moreover, you sound like someone too dependent on his tools to produce his artwork. Tools will only take you so far.

I've seen so much impressive artwork done with GIMP, MyPaint, Krita, Blender and Inkscape that blows a lot of art "professionally done with professional tools" out of the water.

I've done some good looking stuff on Blender, GIMP and Inkscape as well and I can attest that while not perfect - what is? - these tools are more than capable of assisting one to produce all kinds of digital artwork.