Twenty-five years. A quarter century. That’s how long we’ve been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck.
I only became part of Krita in 2003, when Krita was still part of KDE’s suite of productivity applications, KOffice, later renamed to Calligra… And I became maintainer of Krita in 2004, when Patrick Julien handed over the baton. That means that I’ve been around Krita for about twenty of those twenty-five years, so I’ll hope you, dear reader, will forgive me for making this a really personal post; a very large part of my life has been tied up with Krita, and it’s going to show.
↫ Krita website
While it may not be as popular as something like LibreOffice due to fewer people needing it, Krita is a cornerstone application of the Linux desktop (it’s also available for Windows and macOS), and I honestly can barely believe it’s been around for this long. I’m about as far removed from being an artistic painter as a squirrel’s tail is from being a functioning propeller engine so I don’t have need for Krita, but I’m always surprised by how many people mention using it for their painting endeavours.
I wish the project and its developers another successful 25 years, and they’re going to need it – Krita 5.3 is coming soon(ish), and the much more involved Krita 6.0, which makes the jump fro Qt 5 to Qt 6, is also in the works. On a personal note, I’m online acquainted with the lead maintainer of Krita, and as she alludes to at the end of the article, COVID hit her hard, and maintaining such a huge open source project isn’t easy to begin with. Much respect for keeping it up, and of course, to everyone else contributing to the project.
Krita is amazing! I’m not really an artist, but I have a sketch tablet connected to my Linux computer and use it with Krita. And every time I use Krita I am amazed at how functional and polished it is!
Also that mascot is flippin’ adorable.
https://krita.org/en/about/mascot/
I use Krita at least once a week. I had no idea it was 25 years old already. I thought it was a more recent app.
Also TIL that it was part of the old KOffice. That being the case, it might be the only usable piece of software from that suite left.
Krita is such an incredible piece of software. I think it edges out Blender as a showcase of the quality that open source creative software achieve, and is light years ahead of GIMP in that regard
It is a great example why a good UI is so important.
Sadly many open-source projects don’t recognize this and fail…
Drumhellar,
I agree. I really appreciate how refined krita is, but I almost never use it because I don’t do the sort of ART krita is used for. Most of my raster graphic needs are basic enough that I can get by with gimp. I use inkscape almost every week though, I find vector graphics extremely useful for making diagrams and whatnot. Aside: I’ve almost completed an inkscape based laser projector too. I thought Inkscape would be an awesome interface for a laser projector, and it is, but I didn’t realize how limited the extension API was. I ended up needing to fork inkscape to create my own “projector plugin”.
smashIt,
Many have poor UI, but some really do stand out. Props to wireshark and krita for being exceptional. I wish I could put blender on the same list since I love that application but honestly the UI has a steep learning curve and even after learning it some of the UI decisions remain strange and unintuitive. I’ve been trying my hand at geometry nodes by throwing myself challenges, here I’ve implemented a quadrature radio tuner in blender.
https://ibb.co/KwJnVF6
I don’t like that blender’s approach to shaders and geometry nodes are leaky abstractions. That expose end users to the pains of programming for the underlying opengl API…ugh. As a software engineer I am very comfortable with programming algorithms, but as things get more complex blender/opengl’s contorted way of doing things is a struggle. This is not intrinsic to parallel GPU programming – for example I love programming in cuda, but that’s not what blender went with (for obvious reasons). Blender shaders would have been much nicer with a more programmer friendly abstraction.
I enjoy creating dynamically generated textures too. Most 3d artists don’t know how to do this, but functional textures are very powerful. I’d have to concede that as awesome as I find function based textures, it’s so much easier and faster to just import a texture map from a real photo to produce realistic results strait away. With functional shaders you end up trying to emulate those photos, and while I can get very good results, it takes a lot more time. In theory though, a game that uses purely functional textures & geometry can fit far more complexity into far less GPU ram (and disk space). Think 8k graphics without needing 8k assets.
/off topic
I know that Krita is supposed to be better and has a friendlier UI, and also I’m using the KDE desktop, but I’m a baby duck who knows a bit of Gimp and so I always feel more familiar with how to use Gimp.
j0scher,
I use gimp for things like cropping images, rotating digitized documents, using the pen to highlight stuff, etc. I find the gimp’s tools to be rather basic and a bit tedious and buggy for more sophisticated things. It turns out this doesn’t matter too much for me since I don’t do art with it, but I understand why a real artist would want more.
I will say that I like gimp a lot better now than when its UI used to be comprised of several floating windows. Remember that?