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Whew, what a year

krita.org

79 pointsemilsedgh23 comments

OT: Krita and others are doing great things for content creators who want to use FOSS.

BUT most of their work is lost to us due to the way distros handle external software. If you install Krita, gimp, darktable in debian you will get really ancient versions (unless you use a PPA from a mostly unknown source, but even then you can get quite old versions).

Hopefully Snap and FlatPak would change that :)

What do they do?

As far as I can tell, they are "fat" distribution packages which are independent (within reason, I guess) of the Linux distro. The aim seems to be to get rid of dependency hell and dependency on exact Linux distro versions, at the cost of larger packages. They also sandbox the app. I'm not sure I understand the disadvantages, besides the larger package size due to redundant libraries.

Hmm, so something like an LXC container? That's interesting, I'll look into it. Thank you!

It seems it is already available for appimage and snap:

    $ snap find krita
    Name   Version  Developer  Notes  Summary
    krita  3.1.1    krita      -      Krita: the free digital painting studio

For the record, the latest apt version on ubuntu is 2.9.7

Isn't that more dependent on your distro than anything else? On openSUSE Leap 42.2, my default is 3.0.1.1, and I could add the less-tested but realistically fine KDE:Extra repository for the latest version. Fedora seems to be shipping 3.1.1 as well. Arch and openSUSE Tumbleweed are also on 3.1.1.

While Pino is busy packaging Krita 3.1.1 for Debian, you can easily run the latest Krita by getting the official appimages that I prepare myself. (Being the Krita maintainer and project lead.)

Thanks for Krita!

Chrome has its own deb repository -- maybe more active projects need this too. (Maybe there's a service to be had hosting and configuring repos?)

I'm on Xubuntu 16.4 and I have 2.9.7 installed. I missed the entire year of developments. 16.10 has 2.9.11 released Feb 4th. 17.4 has 3.1.1 but won't be released for ~4 months. Maybe we should blame Ubuntu for 6 month release cycles, or me for not upgrading, but regardless of the cause, Krita users don't have the new version.

> we should blame Ubuntu for 6 month release cycles

16.04 and onward can now have apps decoupled from the OS release for apps that provide snaps, like Krita does. `snap install krita` will get you 3.1.1.

Thanks! I noticed the /snap directory, but didn't know snap was installed and usable.

Worked on 16.10 and I'll use this on 16.4 too.

Thank you, I was hoping to get an answer like this!

I also noticed that 3.1.1 is available on ubuntu snap. At this point I am not sure if I should go with snap or appimage. Either way, it is great to get packages directly from the developers!

> BUT most of their work is lost to us due to the way distros handle external software.

Distributions put a lot of work into making sure that software they package is managed and handled in a way that their users like. Your example, Debian, is a distribution that favours stability above all else -- so is it a surprise that features are not merged into packages that often? There are many distributions (openSUSE Tumbleweed, Antegros, Arch Linux) that are far more rolling release and have newer packages.

If you want new software, use a distribution that gives you what you want. Don't blame the distribution for providing what the majority of its users (and community) want.

Is krita better than gimp now? Though gimp is good enough for me it appears to have stagnated since 2.8 arrived many years ago.

I haven't tried either in depth, but AFAIK GIMP targets the image manipulation space, while Krita targets the painting space. Of course the will be some overlap, but I think both are the best in their respective niches.

They're not the same.

Krita is more of a painting application akin to Illustrator, whereas GIMP is more of a Photoshop-like editor.

Also, work on GIMP 3.0[1] continues, but there's not enough people working on it, so it takes a while.

1 - https://www.gimp.org/news/2016/07/13/gimp-2-9-4-released

While I'd agree that GIMP and Krita are not same, I think Krita is still closer to GIMP than Illustrator, Ai being a vector editor.

Meanwhile, though probably known to most of the HN crowd it's also worth mentioning Inkscape which is a FOSS alternative to Illustrator of good quality.

I agree with that. Some things are a bit different, like PS -> GIMP, but once I had the basic equivalents down, I found it a great tool.

Adobe Illustrator is not a paint application. It's a graphic design application.

Corel Painter is a digital paint application. [0]

Usage differences between these two programs is huge.

Usually paint programs lack filters, but specialize in brush macros, biasing behavior in favor of starting with a blank drawing areas.

Meanwhile image manipulation programs pretty much have a configurable airbrush and replicate some dark room techniques, and possess a rich filter library, biasing behavior in favor of altering and layering existing content together, after the original creative process.

[0] http://www.corel.com/

Isn't Krita quite different from GIMP?

I haven't used Krita but I've watched some videos about it previously and my impression has been that Krita is more like Corel Painter whereas GIMP is like Photoshop.

IOW, whether Krita is "better" than GIMP might depend heavily on what you are looking to do. If Krita is like I think it is then it would be a much better application for digital painting than what GIMP is, while for photo manipulation GIMP would be much better.

Still waiting for the day I can install krita without pulling 200 packages of KDE bloat

I really don't need upowerd when I want to draw pictures, thank you.

That day arrived May 31st 2016: https://krita.org/en/item/krita-3-0-released/. Get the appimage, make it executable, execute it, done. No need to whine about how Ubuntu drags in the weirdest set of dependencies anymore.

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