Seeing the news about Pinta 3.1, I thought I should warn you about how GNOME efed up a bunch of image editors (Pinta included) and made it irreversible.
I just said "farewell" to Pinta, after nearly 10 years of using it. Because Pinta uses gdk-pixbuf2 which in turn uses glycin for image processing and guess what? When the image editor doesn't specify compression level (especially for PNG format), by default glycin doesn't compress anything. Thus small files (1000x800) that 3 years ago would have become 800 bytes with maximum compression (level 9), now they'll become 4-5 KiB. If that's happening to small files with a few colors, imagine what will happen with a 4-5 MiB PNG of large dimensions.
It's even worse with JPG/JPEG because the default quality used to be 100%, whereas now it's less than 40%.
And no, you can't remove glycin or gdk-pixbuf2, nor downgrade either one. Gnome's "fatherless people" (you know what word I'm replacing and they deserve it) have taken care of both being so deeply dependent on everything and vice versa, that it's easier to just change the whole desktop (Plasma or LXQt), or change to another program, like Krita. Krita and all KDE/Qt programs use libpng and libjpeg-turbo, instead of glycin, thus the files are STILL 5 times smaller. For now at least. Let's hope that Qt will continue to use libpng.
P.S. I can't help but wonder if this ruining was done on purpose...
I just said "farewell" to Pinta, after nearly 10 years of using it. Because Pinta uses gdk-pixbuf2 which in turn uses glycin for image processing and guess what? When the image editor doesn't specify compression level (especially for PNG format), by default glycin doesn't compress anything. Thus small files (1000x800) that 3 years ago would have become 800 bytes with maximum compression (level 9), now they'll become 4-5 KiB. If that's happening to small files with a few colors, imagine what will happen with a 4-5 MiB PNG of large dimensions.
It's even worse with JPG/JPEG because the default quality used to be 100%, whereas now it's less than 40%.
And no, you can't remove glycin or gdk-pixbuf2, nor downgrade either one. Gnome's "fatherless people" (you know what word I'm replacing and they deserve it) have taken care of both being so deeply dependent on everything and vice versa, that it's easier to just change the whole desktop (Plasma or LXQt), or change to another program, like Krita. Krita and all KDE/Qt programs use libpng and libjpeg-turbo, instead of glycin, thus the files are STILL 5 times smaller. For now at least. Let's hope that Qt will continue to use libpng.
P.S. I can't help but wonder if this ruining was done on purpose...
It turned out Krita had everything both Pinta and KolourPaint offered and then some. Slightly different than both but not too different, so it won't be hard to get used to Krita. Plus Krita offers text alignment - something people have been begging for in KolourPaint for years but the devs kept finding excuses not to do it.
