omadesign

Product Introduction

1. Definition: omadesign is a native Linux creative suite and graphic design application written in Rust, distributed as a free and open-source (MIT-licensed) desktop studio. It combines vector design, page layout, pixel painting, RAW photo development, and motion animation into a single document model with one unified layer stack. Version 0.5.0 ships as prebuilt binaries for x86_64 and ARM64 Linux with a glibc 2.35 baseline, installs into ~/.local (never /usr), and targets both general Linux desktops and the Omarchy/Arch ecosystem, including Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon.

2. Core Value Proposition: omadesign exists to give Linux designers a professional-grade, native creative toolchain that does not depend on GTK, Qt, or Electron, and does not require a cloud account, subscription, or internet connection for core editing. Its primary value keywords are: native Linux design suite, open-source graphic design software, Rust creative app, Omarchy-first design tool, vector and raster editing in one document, RAW photo development on Linux, and portable brand kit files. The suite bundles 52 editable templates, project-local brand libraries (.omacolors, .omabrand, .omatype), layered file interchange with PSD, PSB, XCF, PDF, AI, ORA and SVG, and motion export to animated SVG and Lottie.

Main Features

1. Five Integrated Studios (Design, Layout, Pixel, Photo, Motion): omadesign v0.5.0 unifies five editing personas inside one application and one document, rather than forcing users to round-trip files between separate vector, raster, layout, and animation programs. The Design studio handles vector artwork, Layout introduces a Figma-style frame system with the frame tool bound to the F key, Pixel handles raster painting and masking, Photo handles RAW development, and Motion provides a keyframe timeline. Tabs persist multiple open documents simultaneously, and the shared layer stack means a vector path, a pixel layer, a mask, and an animated track can coexist in the same working file with Undo/Redo continuity. Documents are stored as an editable .oma working copy so the native source is preserved while imports and exports generate conversion notes.

2. Layered Document Interchange and the .oma Format: The suite imports and exports layered PSD/PSB, multi-page PDF and PDF-compatible AI artwork, SVG/SVGZ groups, OpenRaster (.ora), and GIMP .xcf files (introduced in the 0.0.5-alpha line) as pixel layers and groups, preserving names, visibility, opacity, offsets, supported blend modes, and applied masks. An optional Affinity bridge adds partial import for .afdesign, .afphoto, and .afpub files, while newer unified .af support remains unverified against a real document. Export paths include layered PSD, PSB, PDF, and OpenRaster, plus PNG, JPEG, and SVG for still artwork with selectable raster scale. Text and smart objects from other applications are rasterized on import, and conversion notes explicitly document substitutions and flattened appearances.

3. Camera RAW Development with 16-Bit Linear Pipeline: Photo studio development uses a bundled decoder for DNG, Canon CR2/CR3, Nikon NEF, Sony ARW, Fujifilm RAF, and other supported camera formats, rendering full-resolution 16-bit linear pixels rather than an 8-bit preview. Adjustments cover exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, a tone curve, Auto light, temperature, tint, vibrance, saturation, an HSL mixer, shadow/highlight grading, clarity, dehaze, grain, vignette, crop, and rotation. Originals remain untouched because edits persist in a sidecar .omaphoto file beside each image, and developed photos export to 16-bit PNG or TIFF or 8-bit JPEG. Copy/paste adjustments, batch application to selected images or an entire folder, and shareable .omapreset JSON looks support high-volume photo workflows, while RAW placement inside Design drops to an 8-bit pixel layer.

4. Vector Engine: Pen Paths, Node Editing, Pathfinder, and Image Tracing: Vector tools include corner clicks and drag-smooth curves, open path continuation, endpoint joining, Bézier handle manipulation on rotated paths, corner-to-curve conversion, and handle symmetry breaking. Geometric primitives (rectangles, ellipses, polygons, stars, lines) carry adjustable corner radius, side count, and star proportions. Pathfinder operations provide Unite, Subtract, Intersect, Exclude, and Divide on a single layer, with compound path combine/release that preserves holes and Undo history. Stroke outlines convert a dashed, capped, or joined stroke into editable filled geometry while retaining the original fill underneath. Image tracing converts a pixel layer into vector paths using adjustable threshold, color count, and smoothness parameters, and reshape cages add distort, skew, perspective, and a nine-handle warp mesh.

5. Motion, Animation Tracks, and Lottie Export: The Motion studio animates position, rotation, scale, and opacity alongside stroke and fill reveals, storing the motion clip inside the native .oma document rather than a separate timeline project. The timeline supports keyframe creation, drag retiming, easing changes, deletion, scrubbing, playback, and looping directly on the canvas. Thirteen built-in presets (Draw stroke, Pop in, Slam, Shake, Fill up, four slide directions, Fly, Zoom, Buzz, Fade in) generate ordinary editable keyframes governed by duration, delay, stagger, intensity, and starting playhead position. Export targets are animated SVG with masks and effects, or Lottie for supported vector animation, with Lottie reporting unsupported pixel layers, layer masks, and effects; MP4 and GIF are outside the current scope.

6. Layout Engine with Nested Frames, Auto-Layout, and Constraints: The Layout persona introduces a frame tool, rectangles, live type, and image placeholders, with frames that legally contain child frames and preserve the document graph across save and reopen. Auto-layout stacks pack children vertically or horizontally with configurable gap, padding, and stretch, deliberately described as adequate for UI mockups rather than production layout. Constraints pin a child to min, max, both, center, or scale behavior when a parent frame resizes. Starters include a mobile screen, landing hero, dashboard, and card stack, and frame export produces PNG, SVG, or a simple HTML snapshot of the selected frame.

7. Brand Kits, Portable Fonts, and Template Library: Brand assets are stored as plain files beside the project: .omacolors for named palettes, .omatype for font roles, and .omabrand for artwork plus bundled fonts, including .omabrand/fonts so TTF and OTF files travel with the document without system installation and keep live text editable. Palettes support creation, naming, duplication, filtering, color sampling from artwork, transparent hex values, and swatch application to fill or stroke. Searchable brand banks collect logos, images, and native artwork with background previews and disk refresh, and dragging a brand tile onto an artboard or double-clicking to center preserves editable vector artwork and motion with one Undo per placement. Fifty-two original templates span nine categories (posters, identity, social, editorial, and more) across portrait, square, and landscape proportions, backed by twenty document presets for print, screen, social, identity, and photo sizes.

8. Painting, Masking, and Raster Retouching: Pixel tools cover brush painting with adjustable size and hardness, Shift-constrained strokes from the last free point, erase, connected-area fill, and smudge for local color blending. Clone and healing brushes use Alt-click source sampling, where Clone copies texture and Healing blends sampled texture with destination local color. Pixel selections support rectangular and elliptical marquees, freehand lasso, and tolerance-based magic wand. Editable layer masks can reveal all, hide all, or initialize from a selection, then be painted black or white, inverted, removed, or applied destructively to pixels.

9. Workspace, Precision, and Omarchy Desktop Integration: At launch the interface reads Omarchy theme colors and the desktop font, falling back to Catppuccin when no Omarchy theme is present. Precision features include ruler-dragged guides, movable origin, unit switching across pixels, millimeters, centimeters, inches, and points, plus editable non-printing object guides derived from vector contours that snap and can be released back to artwork. Smart alignment snaps to objects, artboards, guides, and grid with alignment lines and equal-spacing measurements; Shift constrains placement to horizontal, vertical, or 45 degrees, Ctrl reverses snapping mid-drag, and Shift+Alt clones. A context-sensitive Shortcut HUD follows the active tool and held modifiers, toggled with Ctrl+/ or expanded fully with F1. Background recovery autosaves changed documents, including project fonts, and save prompts plus library conflict notices guard unsaved artwork and palette drafts. Rendering is cached, and previews, file scans, and exports run in the background.

10. Optional Cloud Sync, Pins, and Public Showcase: Cloud sync is off by default and must be enabled per document, with identity stored in the user's account and a last-write-wins conflict model; threaded comments and pins attach to frames, support replies, resolution, and reopening, and the inspector counts open pins. A public showcase publishes a title, tags, and a still image, while unpublished work never appears publicly. A companion design competition waitlist with published rules is also included in v0.5.0.

Problems Solved

1. Pain Point: Linux-based designers have historically been forced into three bad options: running Windows or macOS creative suites in virtual machines or Wine with broken GPU and font handling, accepting GIMP/Inkscape/Blender as disconnected single-purpose tools that require constant format conversion, or adopting Electron-based web design apps that consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM and ignore desktop theming. omadesign directly addresses the fragmented Linux design workflow problem, the cross-application file round-trip problem, the subscription licensing problem, the cloud-account lock-in problem, and the theming inconsistency problem by shipping a native Rust binary that installs under ~/.local, reads the desktop theme, and keeps all documents and brand assets as local files.

2. Target Audience: Primary personas include Linux-native graphic designers and brand identity designers on Arch, Omarchy, and Fedora workstations; Asahi Linux users on Apple Silicon who lack native Apple creative software; open-source-first studios and agencies that require MIT-licensed tooling for compliance; product and UI designers on Linux who need frame-based mockups without leaving a local, offline app; photographers using Linux who develop DNG, CR2/CR3, NEF, ARW, or RAF files and need batch adjustment plus 16-bit TIFF/PNG export; illustrators and digital painters who want vector and raster brushes in one document; motion and interaction designers producing animated SVG or Lottie for the web; and hobbyist template users who want fifty-two offline, editable layouts without a design subscription. Secondary audiences include DevOps and IT administrators who prefer per-user installs without root, and open-source contributors who want a Rust codebase to extend.

3. Use Cases: Concrete scenarios where omadesign is essential or strongly advantageous include: (a) developing a full folder of RAW wedding or event photographs with one copied look applied in the background via batch adjustments and .omapreset presets, then exporting 16-bit TIFFs; (b) building a complete brand identity system with .omacolors palettes, .omatype font roles, and an .omabrand artwork bank that travels with the project folder to another machine; (c) opening an inherited Photoshop PSD or GIMP XCF client file, editing layers and masks natively, and exporting back to PSD or OpenRaster; (d) sketching a mobile app screen with nested frames, auto-layout stacks, and constraints, then exporting a frame as PNG, SVG, or HTML for developer handoff; (e) creating an animated logo reveal using the 13 motion presets, refining keys on the timeline, and exporting animated SVG or Lottie for a website; (f) preparing posters, social posts, and editorial spreads from the 52-template library at custom dimensions and DPI without internet access; (g) producing a print-ready piece with ruler guides, millimeter units, editable object guides, smart spacing, and Select-by-Appearance for batch restyling; and (h) enabling opt-in cloud sync with threaded pin comments for review feedback on a client deliverable.

Unique Advantages

1. Differentiation: Against Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, and After Effects, omadesign competes on platform nativeness, licensing, local file ownership, and unified document scope rather than raw feature parity — it provides vector, raster, layout, photo, and motion editing in one layer stack instead of four separate applications and file formats. Against GIMP, Inkscape, and Krita, it differentiates through a single shared document, layered PSD/PSB/XCF/ORA interchange, a Rust native binary, and integrated motion export. Against Figma and Canva, it differentiates through full offline operation, no mandatory account, native desktop performance, RAW photo handling, and CMYK-adjacent print-oriented units and guides while explicitly conceding that advanced publishing, reusable symbols, and real-time collaboration are out of scope. Against Electron-based design apps, it differentiates through native Rust rendering, cached previews, background exports and file scans, desktop theme inheritance from Omarchy, and an install footprint placed entirely in the user's home directory.

2. Key Innovation: The central innovation is the "one document, one layer stack" architecture combined with a per-project, file-based asset protocol. Rather than exporting brand tokens between apps, omadesign stores palettes (.omacolors), typography roles (.omatype), artwork and bundled fonts (.omabrand/fonts), photo adjustments (.omaphoto), and reusable looks (.omapreset) as portable dotfiles that live beside the .oma document and travel with a simple folder copy. Layering a Rust-native, memory-safe rendering core on top — with cached rendering, background preview and export workers, ARM64 and x86_64 builds, a glibc 2.35 baseline, Asahi Linux support, and Omarchy/Catppuccin theme inheritance — produces a Linux-first creative suite that behaves like a desktop application rather than a wrapped web page. The open MIT license and the project's explicit alpha-status bug-report posture further distinguish it from closed, subscription-gated creative tooling.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. What is omadesign and which Linux distributions does it run on? omadesign is a free, MIT-licensed, native Rust creative suite for Linux that unifies vector design, layout, pixel painting, RAW photo development, and motion animation in one document. Release downloads support x86_64 and ARM64 Linux with a glibc 2.35 baseline, which covers Arch, Omarchy, Fedora, Ubuntu 22.04+, and similar distributions, plus Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon. It is not a macOS or Windows build. Installation runs curl -fsSL https://omadesign.app/install | sh and places the application in ~/.local rather than /usr, so no root access is required.

2. Can omadesign open Photoshop PSD, GIMP XCF, and Affinity files? Yes, with documented limits. omadesign imports layered PSD and PSB files, GIMP .xcf files as pixel layers and groups with names, visibility, opacity, offsets, supported blend modes, and applied masks, plus multi-page PDF and PDF-compatible AI artwork, SVG/SVGZ groups, and OpenRaster layers. Photoshop text and smart objects arrive as saved layer pixels, and XCF text and effects are rasterized. Affinity .afdesign, .afphoto, and .afpub import requires an optional bridge and is partial, losing most live effects and publishing structures; the newer unified .af format is unverified against a real document. Export back to layered PSD, PSB, PDF, and OpenRaster is supported, but native AI and Affinity writing is not.

3. Does omadesign require an account, internet connection, or subscription? No. Core editing, all 52 templates, local brand libraries, vector tools, painting, layout, motion, and RAW development work entirely offline with no omadesign account. Optional features that need connectivity are downloading Google Fonts or icon libraries, searching Pixabay and Pexels (which additionally require your own API keys), and the opt-in per-document cloud sync with pins, threads, and the public showcase. The application is free and open source under the MIT license.

4. How does omadesign handle RAW photo editing and batch adjustments on Linux? It opens DNG, Canon CR2/CR3, Nikon NEF, Sony ARW, Fujifilm RAF, and other supported camera files with a bundled decoder and develops full-resolution 16-bit linear pixels. You can copy one photo's adjustments and apply them to a selected range or an entire folder in the background with progress tracking and cancellation, save reusable .omapreset JSON looks, and store each original's edits in a sidecar .omaphoto file so the source image is never modified. Exports are available as 16-bit PNG or TIFF or 8-bit JPEG. Camera and compression coverage varies, and proprietary camera looks and automatic lens corrections are not reproduced.

5. What are omadesign's current limitations as an alpha release? omadesign is explicitly an alpha with rough edges, and its own documentation lists out-of-scope areas: advanced publishing and text layout, reusable symbols, real-time collaboration, a complete Affinity or Illustrator round trip, PDF/X and CMYK print workflows, and motion export to MP4 or GIF (only animated SVG and Lottie are supported, and Lottie cannot preserve pixel layers, layer masks, or effects). RAW support varies by camera and compression, Affinity import is partial, and the auto-layout stacks are described as imperfect on purpose. Affinity import also requires a separate optional bridge setup, and EPS/PS import needs Ghostscript. Bug reports from alpha users are welcomed as part of the project's development model.