Worst Blog Ever

Why is that? Because it just works better on Windows.

See, I use GIMP to create my comic strips, and using GIMP, at least on windows, there are some great features that are enabled with the tablet.

The Wacom Bamboo tablet has some really cool features...at least they did with GIMP under Windows.

See the little click-wheel thing in the top centre? That would allow you to zoom in and out of a particular section when drawing. And while they aren't displayed well in this picture of the tablet, the click wheel is surrounded by four buttons which you could do various functions with. One other thing that I absolutely loved was the pen/eraser feature. If you take a good look at the pen/stylist in the photo, you will see that the bottom nib looks like a pen/pencil nib, whereas the top nib looks like an eraser on a pencil. Well, you could easily assign different brushes to these nibs by tapping the appropriate brush/tool in GIMP. For instance, the pen nib could be a calligraphy brush, whereas the top nib could be an eraser. This would save tonnes of time when you wanted to quickly erase something from your drawing. Finally, one of the great features of using this with Windows version of GIMP is the pressure sensitivity of the stylist. You know how if you press lightly with a real paint brush, you can get a fine line using just the tip; and when you press harder, the line with get thicker and darker because you are pressing more of the brushes' surface area onto the paper? Well this gave the brush the feeling of a real paint brush.

Well none of these features works in GIMP in Linux Mint!  Which, to be honest, I could probably grow accustomed to. But to top it all off, the quality of output you get with GIMP through Linux Mint is horrible!  I mean it is really abysmal!  For instance, when drawing a strip, the first thing that I do, is to use the pencil tool in GIMP to draw a blue line sketch of how I want the strip to look. Using the pencil tool, coupled with a thin brush and the pressure sensitivity allowed me to draw some nice free flowing lines that I could then layer upon to do my tracing of the line drawing. But the output that I get using GIMP on Linux Mint is all pixelated and there is absolutely no differentiation between the line pressure meaning that I can't find the line I wanted to trace as each line (which will overlay other lines) looks exactly like the other line. It is horrible!

I have found a tool that does let me use the Wacom Tablet exactly as I had in the past called My Paint. And in some ways it is much better than GIMP as it comes standard with a butt-load of different brushes. The only problem that I have with My Paint is that it doesn't have the higher functions that were built into GIMP like cloaning, various special effect, etc. Hell, it doesn't even allow moving of a copy/paste!

So for the moment, I'm looking for a tool like GIMP that works as well on Linux as it did on Windows, or I may have to revert back to Windows.