Drawing

Drawing is a small image editor for Linux that does the simple jobs well: sketch something, annotate a screenshot, crop a photo, censor text, slap an arrow on it, save, done. Built by Romain F. T. as a native GNOME application, it is free and open source under the GPL-3.0 license, and it stays out of your way in a way bigger editors never manage.

The toolbox covers everyday drawing and editing. Pencil, brushes, straight lines, curves and a long list of shapes handle the drawing side, while a highlighter and a text tool take care of annotations. On the editing side you can resize, crop, rotate and flip images, select a region to cut, copy, paste, drag, scale or skew, and apply quick filters like blur or pixelate. PNG, JPEG and BMP files are supported.

The interface follows GNOME conventions: a clean single window, a sidebar with the active tool's options, and tabs so you can keep several images open at once. Contextual hints in the subtitle bar explain what the current tool can do, which makes the app easy to pick up for someone who has never touched an image editor. Zooming past 400% shows sharp pixels, handy for small touch-ups and pixel-level fixes. Keyboard shortcuts cover the common actions, and holding a modifier key shows cursor coordinates and selection details while you work.

Installation on Linux is straightforward: the app is on Flathub as a 13MB download and in most distribution repositories, so it is rarely more than one command away, and the app is translated into dozens of languages by community contributors. It starts fast and uses little memory, which makes it a reasonable default image viewer-adjacent tool on minimal setups.

The current version is 1.0.2, released February 25, 2023. Development has slowed considerably since then: the app is stable and works on modern distributions, but you should not expect frequent updates.

The honest limits: Drawing is Linux-only, with no Windows or macOS version. It edits flat raster images - no layers, no vector tools, no non-destructive editing - so anything beyond casual work wants Pinta, GIMP or Krita instead. File format support stops at PNG, JPEG and BMP, so WebP and TIFF files need converting first. And with the slow release cadence, bugs you hit today may stay unfixed for a while.

For quick sketches, annotations and basic photo fixes on a Linux desktop, though, Drawing earns its place: it opens instantly, does the obvious thing, and never asks you to learn it.