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
This is why I was so pleased when Aosheng introduced me to Polarr. This app is written in Electron and is a very simple and powerful tool. As I continue to make abundantly clear, I am not an artist, designer or photographer. Despite this, I keep taking a ton of photos during my adventures and I need a tool to edit them with.
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.