Tux Paint

Tux Paint is a drawing program for young children, and its whole interface is visible at once: a column of tools down the left, the options for the current tool on the right, the colour palette along the bottom, and the canvas in the middle. There are no menus and no file dialogs to get lost in.

Beside brushes, lines, shapes, a fill tool, an eraser and a text tool sit two collections that give the program its character. Stamps drop pre-drawn pictures onto the canvas, many of them with an accompanying sound. Magic tools apply an effect rather than a stroke — blur, tint, chalk outlines, mirroring, textures such as grass or bricks — some painted by dragging, others applied to the whole picture at once.

Saving involves no folder and no file name. Pictures go into an internal gallery and are reopened from thumbnails, so a child never touches the file system. A separate configuration program lets an adult fix the settings in advance: start fullscreen, disable the quit button, simplify the shape tool, choose which stamp and brush collections load. Stamps and extra brushes ship as add-ons.