Krita

Krita is built for artists first — brush engines, stabilizers, animation tools, and tablet support that rival paid software like Corel Painter or Paint Tool SAI. It’s arguably the single best reason for a digital artist to feel good about switching to Linux, and the KDE team ships meaningful updates on a steady cadence.

It’s not a photo editor at heart: batch processing, RAW workflows, and heavy selection-based retouching are better served elsewhere. Tablet behavior under Wayland has improved a lot but still varies by compositor and hardware, so test pen pressure before committing to a big project. On X11 it’s rock solid.