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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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
Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast
I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines. It's available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Here …
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 2, 2026Flood Fill vs the Magic Circle
Musings from Robin Sloan: Most olive oil production at medium-or-greater scale depends on machines of this kind [over-the-row olive harvester]; they trundle over trees planted in long rows, almost like continuous hedges, and collect the fruit with vibratin…
via Information Overload April 2, 2026The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity
Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog April 2, 2026Generated by openring