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Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this is 99.99% of the image work that I do. Take a screenshot, add a box.

On Ubuntu there is no default tool for this, to my knowledge. I installed `pinta`, and it's way overkill and far more complex than paint.

A sane, default, "draw box on image" app is a good thing.

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After recent system change, I went out looking for something better. I've settled on this for now:

https://flameshot.js.org/#/

Simple, mostly[0] bullshit-free, GPL 3 licensed. Grab part of the screen, draw boxes, save to file or clipboard. Between this and delayed capture / whole screen capture available as command line flags, this currently solves all my screenshotting needs. Can even upload to imgur if you care for that.

[0] - I say mostly, because it has some (optional?) tray-icon stuff, which I don't care about as I don't even use a tray/external status bar in my tiling WM.

Flameshot is a recent discovery for me, and it has saved so much time.

Before, screenshots was one of those things that really sucked when using Linux.

Amazing tool.

> A sane, default, "draw box on image" app is a good thing.

Speaking of that, is that still insanely hard to accomplish in Gimp? I haven’t used it in years but I remember being extremely frustrated with it.

Create a selection using the rectangular selection tool, then navigate to [Edit->Stroke Selection].

that's far from intuitive

Once you've invested the time into getting familiar with Gimp it's not terribly hard, but it's more effort to learn than paint which is dead simple out of the box.

Plus Gimp still takes 20+ seconds to start before it's fully useable (even on SSD!), vs paint being ready to go on less than a second

Gimp was never meant to do those kinds of operations, and it still can't - at least not "easily"; it's still as cumbersome as before.

You can still do "pixel level" editing - you just can't do primitives.

Honestly, though, it's not the right tool for that.

If I need to do vector art, then I'll use a vector art program like inkscape. If I need to do CAD, then there's a number of options in that space as well.

If I need to do pixel level editing, or something similar, my go-to editor on Linux is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrafX2

...mainly because I'm familiar with it since it is virtually a clone of various editors I used on my Amiga back in the day.

That makes sense. I remember being frustrated though because Gimp was usually the only imaging app that came installed in a desktop Linux system. And I never found a good Paint-like app that wasn’t super buggy.

The Linux program most similar to Paint that I know of is KolourPaint[1]. If my memory of Paint serves me right (I haven't seen that program in many years), KolourPaint seems pretty much like a clone of Paint.

[1] https://kde.org/applications/graphics/kolourpaint/

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