First Beta for Krita 5.0 released | Hacker News Reader

First Beta for Krita 5.0 released

krita.org

154 pointsmarcodiego58 comments

I love how you can buy it on Steam/Windows Store/Epic. It's a great way to support the project, really more FOSS should do that (putting a paid version in stores). Yes it's literally the same but still some people just like to have everything in one library.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/krita/9n6x57zgrw96

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/p/krita

https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita/

Remember that Steam takes a hefty cut (I believe it's 30%?), if you want to contribute monetarily, consider donating the same amount directly through the Krita website.

It'd be great if Steam distributed these sorts of software at cost. Meaning the cost of transaction plus hosting.

Indeed, especially with this renewed push for SteamOS.

But I suspect it would open them for lots of abuse if it were anything standardized, probably attracting the more dubious subgroup within open-core software or whatnot.

Just a non-profit foundation filter should be good enough for now perhaps.

Just for those who want to support the project, Krita have also launched a Development Fund (based on the success of Blenders Development Fund).

https://fund.krita.org/

They currently only have $4244 monthly contributions, and their aim is $17000 a month (to support 5 developers)

I would also recommend itch.io which I believe is independent and you can set the percentage that itch gets (which is extremely generous).

The KDE Apps[1] are far less well known than they should be. They are of a consistently high quality. I recently discovered "KStars"[2], a beautiful Stellarium-style desktop planetarium that can even control your robotic telescope.

The only mildly annoying thing is that the apps web page mixes desktop apps and mobile apps, they really should be separated.

[1]: https://apps.kde.org

[2]: https://apps.kde.org/kstars/

KStars looks awesome. Do you know if it can do a dome projection? I can't find anything in docs and I don't have the space to explore it right now

I don't know for sure, but I don't think so.

Krita along with Blender are my two go-to examples of FOSS projects done right. Both are run excellently and are coming to equal or exceed their commercial counterparts across the board. Projects looking to break into the mainstream and become mainstays in their fields would do well to model themselves after Krita and Blender.

I'll say the same for VLC !

Great to hear. Krita is absolutely great. Even though it's designed for painting it still has an absolutely great UI and UX and I do much of my basic editing. Personally I find the UX way better than GIMP despite it not being designed for editing.

I sort of hope that they also make the photo editing features better to compete with GIMP and Photoshop.

I hope they don't. As I see it the success of Krita was precisely that, being specifically targeted at digital painting.

Now, GIMP could be way better at what it does and I don't even think their biggest issue is their UI, as they have done some work on it. But for the recent interactions I had about it regarding some tweet from Snowden about GIMP on a somewhat recent thread on r/linux (nice place to have some decent discussion btw, I was banned from it), it seems not only devs don't have the funds, they don't want GIMP to be anymore successful. Like, I got a fair amount of vitriol just for mentioning that it was so weird that GIMP offers no tools to draw geometric shapes - you have to fill circular/rectangular selections to do so (!), when in pretty much every other image editor there are specific tools to draw rectangles, circles, ovals and the like.

Disagreeing about design decisions is not the same as "not wanting the product to be any more successful"

Gimp has a way to draw circles. You use the circle selection tool and then use the trace selection menu button which draws a line around the selected circle in your choice of brush.

Not that I care for drawing circles in GIMP, but that's two steps -- one of which I didn't know was even possible.

Sure, but this isn't exactly intuitive for new users - even those that have experience with others raster editing programs. The de facto expectation is that there is some dedicated facility for drawing shapes and lines.

I think it would be useful as a quiz to an adventure game, I would not pass that level without a cheat though

I found Gimp to be to be less than intuitive, but don't tell others that. The first reply is usually “it's a different, but not harder workflow, than Photoshop, and you'll get used to it.” I had never used Photoshop until last year, so didn't have the bias. Still found Photoshop much easier to pick up.

Gimp is still great, but there are choices I just don't get.

I was with you all the way, til you said:

  >Gimp is still great...

It's not. It's fucking shite. Just because it's free people seem to have this 'Emperor's New Clothes' mentality about it, where they have to convince themselves it's a worthy piece of software. It's not. It's awful and perpetuates the stereotype that free / OSS / Linux apps have to be inferior, clunky and unintuitive.

Applications like Krita, on the other hand, show that you can actually have free Linux software that can be as good [and as good looking] as the commercial 'pro' offerings.

I still wish they'd lose the hideous cutesy Manga splash screen imagery though [Similar is also used by Ibis Paint on Android [0]] as, for me anyway, it really undermines the "professional design software" message.

[0] https://ibispaint.com/?lang=en-US

Well, that's not going to happen :-). As long as Tyson Tan is prepared to create Kiki splash screens, we'll keep using them! You can start Krita with --no-splash if it really bothers you, though.

Gimp totally matches its name. From urban dictionary:

Gimp: a derrogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medicial problem that results in physical impairment. -- which is exactly what GIMP -- the OSS project -- is : a disabled, physically impaired image manipulation program.

We won't... We really like what we're doing, we like the artists we make Krita for and we've got so much more to do before we can beat Clip Studio (like fix our text shape!) that it'll keep us busy forever.

Yeah, their layering seems much more intuitive to me, and so powerful, allowing you to build complex multi-pass filters very easily.

I also switched my photo editing from Gimp to Krita. I tried it for the adjustment layers, and stayed for the superior UI.

Krita is one of those open source tools that astounds me with its professionalism and the phenomenal quality of its output. I am no visual artist, but I've seen many people produce just gorgeous pictures with it -- it really highlights my own inability! I feel that Krita has surpassed commercial offerings in this area (i.e. Corel painter) but I'm really too inexpert to tell.

Krita has improved a lot lately. It doesn't crash as easily as before.

When drawing with a brush, and then a line and then a brush again, an annoying window pops up complaining about the layers. I wish it would just select the appropriate last used layer when drawing with a brush again.

Also, the font window does not default to the last selected font. That's a bit cumbersome.

But all in all, Krita is getting there. Nice work, Krita people!

Krita is very cool, but I see the download instructions for Mac read "Note: if you use macOS Sierra or High Sierra, please check this video to learn how to enable starting developer-signed binaries, instead of just Apple Store binaries." Since we're three, almost four release of the OS since HS, that should probably be updated...

Maybe you should suggest that to Krita.

iirc the single dev who was working in the mac build gave up because metal completely fucked the graphics acceleration. performance is very bad on mac last time i checked

We're making properly signed and notarized, dual-arch binaries for macOS. It's just Sierra and High Sierra, being older versions of macOS don't recognize Apple's new signing and notarizing... Apple changed their binary "security" checked around a bit too much.

How is it possible to sustain 5 developers on $17k/month? It a $19/hr rate!

Either they have other income as well or they don't live in US where $3400/mo is plenty

In Hungary, if that would be your net income, that would put you in the middle-higher tiers of Lead Developer salary range. For comparison, the minimum wage for skilled work would be $2.88/hr.

Wow awesome work, didn't know there was a program out there that was free and open source that could do this! Definitely checking it out.

One small thing, it looks like the slash screen image on the page is fixed width and makes the viewport for mobile devices like 3 times the size it should be. Other than that, good work!

What is the best free alternative to Paint.NET for web developers? I tried GIMP some time ago, but it's interface looked very outdated / unpolished (at least on windows).

Why don't you use paint.net? What's stopping web developers from using it?

I haven't used GIMP on windows for a while, but I see no problems with the interface on Linux.

Online and free and as simple and as powerful as Paint.NET: https://www.photopea.com/

Photopea is so good it's one of the few sites I allow ads via ublock.

Try the pwa version as well. Feels like having photoshop for free.

I use Pinta which has been updated recently:

https://www.pinta-project.com/

I tried out the android version, and it works extremely well. I am curious about how they are handling graphics, and might dig into the source if I have some time.

It's a Qt QWidgets application with the canvas rendered using OpenGL.

Is the G'Mic mentioned in the blog post, same as the one you get in Gimp? Or are any of the plugins left out to be compatible with Krita?

It's the same thing, though we had to fork it. The original architecture is two processes talking to each other over shared memory. But on macOS, the default limits for shared memory are really small, and we had no desire to implement pipes or sockets or tiling to get the layer data from gimp into g'mic-qt and back, so we hacked it into an in-process plugin.

I would pay money for it if they made it available on the iPad Pro. Think £20-40 seems reasonable

The reliance on KDE components is a non-starter for me. It is just too bloated compared to some of the other options.

What other options? Krita is basically first in it's class; I can't think of better painting software.

I don't know if it's in the same league as Krita, but AzPainter is a very light and fast one.

https://gitlab.com/azelpg/azpainter http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/soft/azpainter.html

Corel Painter, but it costs $400 rather than zero.

Don't worry, there are Electron apps you can use instead.

Bloated how? Disk size? API area? The default non-mobile buttons layout? The number of smaller packages that are designed this way because being monolithic made people call it bloated, triggering a major reorganization to what you see now?

Qt (and probably the KDE frameworks) resource usage is so optimized they made some lightweight DEs go "out of business".

I'm curious because I would stop using Linux if there was only GTK applications (I avoid Electron as well). I think the only exception that doesn't drive me mad is Inkscape but I don't need it. I'd rather have bloat than no features at all. GIMP has a manpage for manually drawing circles for christs sake.

Again, the reliance on KDE components. I don't use KDE, therefore relying on them for a package when they shouldn't be necessary for a simple Qt application, adds bloat and dependencies that I would not use otherwise. KDE is not a lightweight DE, especially when compared to Sway and other similar tiling window managers for Wayland.

So disk size is your concern? Because you can't possibly be worried about the kind of complexity I think you're hinting at. Not when just to boot your desktop you'll have to go "over" firmware, the OSes in your disks, the OSes hidden in your CPU, the OSes inside your GPU, a bloated kernel, so on and so forth.

If you use a modern computer you're living in pure bloat. Neofetch showing a small number of packages is placebo. "But I can make sense of everything that's installed in my machine" is placebo. Installing a 5mb window manager on top of that is placebo, and Wayfire feels lighter and faster than Sway in my tests. KDE Plasma is a full desktop environment and that's why it comes with bloat (features) included. Not using Krita because of dependencies doesn't feel like a good argument in the current state of desktop software. Security wise we have so many targets to attack that a few more packages would not make any difference.

I wish it wasn't like that too though. Let's just agree we have a very different definition to what bloat is and call it a day.

The KDE Frameworks 5 libraries we use are functional, useful and have nothing to do with the KDE Plasma desktop. In any case, the word "bloat" is a sure sign the person who uses the word has no clue what they are talking about.

KDE has been the lightest DE (including over Mate, LXDE) for a while now.

Bloated is the very last way I'd describe KDE. I was surprised to learn even Subsurface uses Kirigami; knowing Linus' opinion on weight that's some endorsement!

Are you aware of Sway?

That made me feel kinda nostalgic. It's been years since someone made that claim... Especially the bit about "other options". I only consider Photoshop, Corel Painter and Clip Studio as "competition" for us.

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