Polarr; Professional Photo Editing on Linux
One of the most frustrating things about being a desktop Linux user is that a lot of software is either:
- Half Baked, Buggy, and Free
- Half Baked, Buggy, and Completely Overpriced
- Unavailable
On Ubuntu the choices are either to use the built in Shotwell app which is just OK. You can fumble through GIMPs incomprehensible menus and feature sets, or you can move sliders around in darktable. I don’t mean to poke fun at these tools. I truly appreciate all of the hard work that has gone into developing them, and I am certian that for a professional designer who actually understands what they are doing they are worth learning. But for someone like me, who just wants to click a button and make a photo not look awful nothing on Linux comes close to Polarr.
I love how Electron has made creating cross platform desktop applications completely painless. I think it allows application developers to enable Linux support by default and opens them up to a huge and often overlooked market.
Polarr is free to use with a basic feature set, and you can get the full version for an astonishingly low price of $9.99. If you do anything with Photos on Linux, go buy this right now.
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Check out some more stuff to read down below.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- A eulogy for Vim from Drew DeVault's blog
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
- Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
- Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- On Alliances from Smashing Frames
- Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
- Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Speed is Not Conducive to Wisdom
Speed has become the primary virtue of the modern world. Everything is sacrificed to it. Move fast (and break things, not as a goal but as a consequence). Wisdom requires allowing yourself to be undone by experience: An opinion dismantled by reality. An artif…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog April 15, 2026“To build a thing that immediately feels like you’ve had it forever is very hard to do.”
What Version History, a YouTube show from The Verge, does really well is revisiting older tech products from today’s perspective without allowing nostalgia to take over. This episode about the Western Electric 500 – the canonical American land…
via Unsung April 15, 2026Generated by openring