Is the classic image meme dead, or buried under an avalanche of AI slop? Memerist, a new(ish) native meme generator for Linux, emerged on Flathub recently to help dig them out.
Memerist is a native (GTK4/libadwaita) app for Linux desktop. It is technically an image editor with a focused set of features, geared to those who want a convenient, local tool to quickly create and share popular memes.
While the primary use case is for making memes, Memerist will open any image file. You can use it to add text and simple effects to anything – pursuit of a LOL or an upvote needn’t be the only reason.
Several meme templates come built-in, but you can create and import your own for future use. I tried the (never unfunny) ‘two buttons’ meme template to add custom text to.
Text content, font, font size and opacity can be adjusted, with on-canvas preview to see how the text looks in position. It’s possible to rotate text without losing the ability to edit it, which is great to angle things to the perfect angle.
You can drag text (and image overlay) layers around to reposition. There’s no way to scale image overlays once imported, so size them correctly first, and no layers panel (for an app this focused, that’s fine) so click an element to access its edit properties in the sidebar.
Other features include cropping and transform controls, blend modes, opacity and two basic global image filters (represented by icons I can’t quite decipher – they apply a colour pop or a pixelated effect to the whole graphic, respectively).
Memes export as PNG files to ensure there’s no overt compression to spoilt your creation (the images on this blog tend to look awful because they get triple compressed from JPEG to WebP on upload, then re-compressed in WebP by our CDN, fwiw).
Why not use an online meme generator?
Meme generators are not new, and you can find plenty of them online. But they have their own frustrations: accounts, watermarks, upload limits or privacy concerns (if you’re making a meme out of a personal pic).
Plus, many online tools to create memes have drifted toward AI generation and away from the simple template-and-text workflow that Memerist favours – a <4MB offline tool sidesteps those concerns (and means one less tab open in your browser).
Not that a dedicated tool is required to do this as you could use GIMP, Pinta or even Gradia to quip-ify a popular meme template.
But the feature set here is deliberately narrow. There haven’t been many dedicated meme generator apps for Linux – at all – as fund on other OSes. That makes this one all the more special, so I figured I’d spotlight it.
Memerist is free, open source software available on Ubuntu (and other Linux distros) from Flathub, with source code available on GitHub. The app just hit version 0.4.2. If you tried this out in December (when it was in alpha), be sure to update.
Download Memerist on Flathub.