When I made the jump from Windows to Linux midway through 2025, I knew I had to find an alternative to one of my favorite image editors, Paint.net. It was simple, it did the job, and unfortunately, it wasn't on Linux. So, I went for the next-best thing I could think of off the top of my head: GIMP.

GIMP was doing well for a little while, but the longer I used it, the more I felt the friction points versus what I wanted from an image editor. And it's easy to see why I felt them; Paint.net is a very simple little app, while GIMP is a little too mighty for the use-cases I was giving it. However, one of my biggest pain points was that I wanted to use GIMP as a drawing tool, and GIMP is not great for that. So, it was time to find a new home, and I found one in Krita.

Krita's KDE roots are a huge benefit for me

I'm already loving KDE Plasma on any Linux distro I use

When I set off to find an alternative to GIMP, one of the first apps I stumbled upon was Krita. Well, imagine my surprise when I discovered that the same people who created my favorite Linux desktop environment, KDE, also built this image editing tool that I had only just learned about!

Knowing that Krita came from the great minds over at KDE was a major reason why I downloaded it in the first place. I'm not exaggerating when I say that KDE Plasma was a huge motivator for me to finally swap from Windows to Linux, and I really appreciate how the KDE team operates and how they get things done. As such, giving their image editing software a try felt like a no-brainer.

Krita's more Paint-like tools suit me better than GIMP

It's more of an art program than a photo editor

As I mentioned earlier, GIMP performed fine until I tried drawing and annotating elements as I did with Paint.net. That's largely where GIMP began falling apart for me, and I don't really blame GIMP for that at all. I don't think it has ever been an app suited for people who want to draw, and my choosing to download GIMP was like trying to fit a square in a round hole. That one's on me, I admit.

However, Krita fit the bill very nicely. It's an art program first and foremost, and while I probably won't be using all the professional artist tools that come with Krita, it does feel more like Paint.net than GIMP does. In fact, it adds some very nice features that make me enjoy Krita more than I did Paint.net.

Take the paint dropper tool, for instance. When I'm tweaking images, I often reach for it so I can smooth out colors and extend backgrounds. While GIMP does have a paint dropper, it never felt readily on hand; meanwhile, Krita lets you activate the paint dropper by holding down Ctrl. Click the color you want to load onto the palette, and you're done. Click a second color, and the first one is shunted down to the secondary color slot; also a really useful feature. It's quick, snappy, and I love it.

Krita gave me non-destructive editing long before GIMP did

I'm glad GIMP got it, but it was too little too late for me

One thing I learned to love early on was Krita's non-destructive editing. If you're not sure what that means, destructive editing is what happens when you shrink an image, expand it again, and find that the once-pristine photo now looks like a mess of blurry pixels. This is because the art program only edited the image's pixels, so when you squish a picture down, all that quality gets lost and 'forgotten'.

On the other hand, Krita allows for non-destructive editing. This is where the image app 'remembers' what the image looked like at full resolution and applies that to your transformations. That means you can reduce and resize something as much as you like, and the image editor will use the original image as a reference, so you don't lose quality.

The good news is that GIMP recently got this feature, too. The bad news is, I've already kind of fallen for Krita, so it's too little, too late for me.

Krita is my new home away from my old Windows home

When I grabbed GIMP as a quick Paint.net replacement, I made the wrong call. GIMP is still an amazing app, but it just wasn't what I wanted from an image editor. Fortunately, Krita was there to show me exactly what open-source drawing apps can do, and I'm impressed.