2005 was definitely the year of Inkscape. I have been in absolute love with ever since I found it...if only some other open source graphics apps were this user friendly..:::cough::Gimp::cough:: :P

i would have voted for krita, as it got a lot of improvements this year. To bad it isn't a option yet.

Krita has been added.

--jeremy

thanks for adding krita (I definitively did for it, but I am little biased toward it )

gotta go gimp

I wanted to vote for Gimp, but I could not bring myself to do it, and here's why:

- No layer effects
- If you open a Photoshop file and then save it, you break it
- PDF support is weak compared to Photoshop
- Scaling, rotating, skewing/shearing, etc. all suck in Gimp and are painful compared to Photoshop
- The GUI sucks. There should be an option to enable ALL Gimp windows to come forward when I bring the focus to any one given Gimp window - or at minimum all the palettes. Don't make me hunt for a palette when I had to bring a file manager window forward to move a file. I dislike MDI, but at least Photoshop is not a bear to manage.
- Tablet support is weak compared to Photoshop
- Feather and grow should work like every single other image editor on the planet. Why should I have to relearn feathering and grow(expand) and then screw up when I have to do work in Photoshop because I've grown accustom to The Gimp's eccentricies?
- Why can I not group layers together, have sublayers, etc.?
- Text handling SUCKS in Gimp

I use Gimp all the time but for some things I need to go to another workstation to use Photoshop - particularly for layer effects. Why should an action which takes a max of three mouse clicks on a single layer in Photoshop require 2 to 4 additional layers and about 30 clicks to accomplish, never mind the fact that to back out and change your effect in Photoshop takes just three clicks, while in The Gimp it's simpler to save and version your image? *&%@ ^*&@^(& ^@!% *!&!!!!!!

Must agree, Inkcape is THE tool that made SVG'ing KDE (and, likely, all other DEs) practical. There are some issues (layer management, point editing), but on some levels it's even handier than Illustrator. Yumm!

i wouldn't say Krita is the best app of those, but it is certainly the one with the most impressive development last year. they're steaming ahead of gimp, quite some accomplishment, imho. many features ppl wanted from the gimp for years are now included in Krita, and some others... i'm looking forward to the stable 1.5 release, and especially to the 2.0 release end of this year!

Blender. Since I've started using it, I became Blender addict

I vote for xfig, xpaint and imagemagick. Because they are fast and featured.

krita is a million miles away from being as good as gimp. comparing krita with gimp is like comparing microsoft's paint to photoshop elements.

i voted for gimp. next best is inkscape (even though they serve a different purpose). both of them are way ahead of the competition.

check the latest krita. even the gimp developers said they where impressed. you should have a look at http://cyrilleberger.blogspot.com. and read http://applications.linux.com/applic...2.shtml?tid=39 for some featurs gimp (and most other apps) don't have.

well of course they would say that. i've got the latest krita. there are a couple of features that gimp doesn't have, but for every feature that kita has that gimp doesn't, there are around 7 that gimp has that krita doesn't.

Inkscape is great

i agree gimp has much more features compared to krita, just as KDE in general has more features compared to gnome... but krita is more usable, faster and it's development goes faster, too. and it already included some things like colorspace independence that gimp apparantly can't include, even after years of being asked by users about this - my guess is their architecture just doesn't allow it, currently.