Dark Artistry

If you are an Adobe user looking to save money or just want to break free from Windows or OS X, open source has you covered. Another great thing about open source tools is the fact that you can be apart of the process, if you so choose. You can contribute in many ways like donating money, assisting in writing documentation or translations, finding bugs or even writing code. This gives the community power that simply buying a product off the shelf cannot. Of course, you can also give back by sharing content or knowledge, just as others might in the Adobe community.

I am not here to pass judgment on Adobe products; although, I consider them damned good. I am offering alternatives only. As a Linux only user I see no reason to use Adobe products and as nice as some features are, I simply do not miss them enough to deal with the headaches of running them in Wine.

Photo Editing, Retouch, and Digital Painting.

Vector Illustration and Desktop Publishing.

3-D Modeling, Sculpting, Animation, and Rendering.

Video Editing, VFX, and VR.

Olive could be a good replacement for KDEnlive and Natron in the future.

Audio Recording and Editing.

Web Development and Design.

What about Acrobat?

You can use LibreOffice to create PDF files and some of the tools listed here can also export to PDF. If you need to edit PDF files and these tools don’t meet your needs you can give PDFedit a try. There are a ton of commercial PDF Editors available for Linux. See my post on proprietary software for Linux.