Drawing, a simple alternative to 'Microsoft Paint' for Ubuntu

In the next article we are going to take a look at Drawing. It is a application to draw in Gnu / Linux environments and the most noteworthy thing about it is its simplicity. There are no complications, practically everything is in sight and we will not find anything excessive when we open the application. It is perfect for those who want to make simple and quick drawings, but it will fall short if you are looking to do something elaborate.

If you have used or still use Windows, it is most likely that you have used and know how useful the application can be MS Paint for some tasks. Drawing is a Basic and simple image editor that works similar to Microsoft Paint but it is aimed at the Gnu / Linux desktop. It is open source and available for free under the GNU GPL v3 license. It is clear that we will not be able to do everything with this application, but it can be useful to use it when editing screenshots, editing basic images, etc.

This application supports popular image formats like JPG, PNG and BMP. With it we will be able to quickly add text in memes and other basic operations such as cropping, scaling, flipping, saturating and rotating, etc. The selection tool will allow us to define an area that users will be able to move, cut, copy, paste, edit with canvas tools, export, open as a new image, etc.

Tools available

The available drawing tools are:

• Pencil.
• Selection.
• Polygons.
• Colour selection.
• Paint (bucket).
• Lines.
• Text.
• Rectangle.
• Circles.
• Arc.
• Free forms.
• As I said before, the selection tool allows you to define an area that we will be able to move, cut, copy, paste, edit with canvas tools, export, open as a new image, etc.

When selecting one of the tools, at the bottom we will see what options we can modify, such as the color, the font and its size with the text or if we want a circle / rectangle to have a background or not and what color.

Related article:

MyPaint a drawing and painting program with support for digitizing tablets

Install Drawing

Drawing is an application that has been created primarily for GNOME, but is also available from Pantheon (elementary OS) and MATE / Cinnamon. What we are going to see in the following lines will be the installation of the GNOME version. We will be able easily install this app from your PPA or using Flathub, which is the most famous repository to get Flatpak applications.

Version 0.5 is the last stable version available of this program in the PPA and features numerous bug fixes, an improved toolbar for 'legacy' and 'toolbar only' layouts, an action to create an image with the contents of the clipboard, a smoother pencil, and several new translations. In the Flatpak package we will find version 0.4.2 available, as you can see in the following screenshot.

Through the PPA

For install Drawing on Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan / 19.04 Disk We will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and copy the following commands in the window that we just opened:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cartes/drawing

sudo apt install drawing

After installation we can find the launcher on our computer to start using the program.

Via FlatPak package

For install the FlatPak package on Ubuntu 19.10 / 19.04 / 18.10 We will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and paste the following command into it:

sudo apt install flatpak

In case of using Ubuntu 18.04 / 16.04 / Linux Mint 19/18To install Flatpak we will have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and paste the following commands into it:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexlarsson/flatpak

sudo apt update; sudo apt install flatpak

After the previous commands, we can install the Drawing application on our computer using the command:

flatpak install flathub com.github.maoschanz.drawing

Now we can launch the program by searching for the launcher on our computer or by typing in the terminal the command:

flatpak run com.github.maoschanz.drawing

We will be able to find this program available in different languages. We will be able to consult all the available options in the project GitHub page or official project page