Krita: A professional free and open source painting program | Hacker News Reader

Krita: A professional free and open source painting program

krita.org

643 pointsdoener233 comments

I love that they are also selling the software in stores (MS, Steam, Epic). You don't get anything extra apart from the automatic updates but it's certainly a nice way to get people to pay for your FOSS project.

Back in 2019 they mentioned that "Krita has gone from 2 to 4 full-time developers over the last 10 months, and Steam has been instrumental in raising the funds to make that possible" https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...

I wish more project would do the same. I know the stores take a cut but my guess would be that it's easier to make people buy there than make them a direct donation for example.

I think it's the same situation with companies paying for software from a company they already have a spending relationship with instead of trying the competition. You lose a lot of people when you ask them to get their card out for yet another entity. It's easier to buy into the nth AWS tool, or Office 365 app, or Steam game than to take a chance with some new person's grasp on security and privacy.

I was using it generally before but bought it on steam 1) to support the project and 2) to have it automatically update itself.

Worth what I paid for it even though I could get it free.

It reminds me a lot of Aseprite, which is free to compile yourself since it's open source, but you have to buy it on Steam for auto-updates and such.

Aseprite calls itself "source available" now. Their license has a "no redistribute" clause, so if want to use it and can't compile it yourself, you have to buy it.

I spent about an hour trying to compile it on Windows a few months ago, couldn't get it working. Can't remember why, maybe most of that time was installing requirements.

Seems like a bit of a perverse incentive.

They were GPLv2 for a while but changed course. I'd use the fork going forward:

https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite

From memory, one of their dependencies (maybe skia?) was a gigantic pain to build. I also wasn't very familiar with ninja, and couldn't debug some of the ninja output from cmake.

Doesn't really matter because I already had a license, but it would have been interesting to play around with the internals.

I know Paint.NET, WinSCP and HexChat does this (Microsoft Store).

Paint.net stopped releasing source code in 2009.

But you can still download it from their website for free. They charge for it on the windows store.

Spoiler warning, all .NET programs can be decompiled. This includes many Unity games.

Decompilation is not the same as source availability. Any binary can be converted into source that will compile back into a (nearly) equivalent binary. Whether that source code is economically viable to use in some derivative work is an entirely different question. It might be easier for .NET binaries to be decompiled but the point still remains that machine generated source code is not the same as human generated source code.

There is a colossal difference between attempting to decompile a native binary (using a tool like Ghidra) and decompiling a .NET binary. .NET binaries contain all the information necessary to express the original program, except for local variable names.

You are left with something highly readable that will build correctly. Unlike native code disassemblies which need to guess at data types and stack usage.

What does the output source look like? Is it legible?

Would decompiling something like paint.net and attempting to compile the out source with Mono (for use on Linux) be a viable pursuit?

I am unfamiliar with the nuances of Mono vs Dotnet, particularly in graphical applications

Is there something like that on Linux that's gtk based but not as complicated as Gimp?

Drawing fits that description, but it isn't really comparable to Krita — the authors describe it as like MS Paint but for Gnome.

Pinta seems similar, but more Xfce-ish.

=> https://maoschanz.github.io/drawing/

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

Here is an old (2016) breakdown of their income sources: https://krita.org/en/item/funding-kritas-development/

I follow their updates semi-regularly so I'm not sure if they made a more recent one that was as detailed. I found a tad depressing to see how much Steam purchases are making compared to donations.

They also had an interesting post about the fact that on the Windows store they cannot mention that you can download it for free as it is against Microsoft TOS: https://krita.org/en/item/krita-in-the-windows-store-an-upda...

They also mention that it's a compromise, it's adding a new income stream but participating in the economy of non-free software.

It's hard to make money with free software, even if your product is industry-level in some aspects.

If Microsoft asked you to make a donation for a product, you'd probably also scoff at the idea.

It is a term that carries lots of connotations, and people are far less likely to do than simply buy a product.

We didn't do an update on that, because that post got us into big trouble with inland revenue (Dutch) in 2017...

Right, I remember the issue... which I think got you to do the proper setup of the Krita foundation to avoid any similar issue (which may have been quite some work and accountant fees).

Thank you for your work, by the way. Krita is one of the things that make me the happiest, with Linux itself. It's such a well-designed software, and it's such a pleasure to paint with it.

> I found a tad depressing to see how much Steam purchases are making compared to donations.

Why's this depressing? They 'charge' a reasonable price on Steam for those who want to either support the project or get automatic updates or both, and the developers for this open source project get funded without having to actually paywall the product. Seems pretty good all around to me!

>You don't get anything extra apart from the automatic updates

I would pay to not have autoupdates, figuratively speaking.

I used to use Gimp for photoshop type operations but it's become unusable for me due to slowness, even with a M1 native build. No idea what's up.

Tried Krita and it works great

Agreed. Just made the switch over to Krita from Gimp for some simple workflows. Everything feels much faster across Mac, Windows, and Linux. Also the tools somehow make a bit more sense out of the box.

I may start doing the same, at least when the tool-sets overlap.

Any experience using it's python scripting tools? I've done some scripting with gimp, but the documentation is really really poor and it was a much more frustrating experience than it ought to have been.

Haven't delved into the scripting just yet.

https://scripting.krita.org/lessons/introduction might help.

I use photopea for the simple stuff

Photopea is pretty darn good. Especially if you are or have been a Photoshop user.

Same. I find gimp even lagging behind photoshop which itself can be a clog. A shame since Gimp is a fantastic app.

Krita is a complete replacement at this point. And, its features caters to drawing/painting to a greater degree than photoshop, by far. The brush engine is phenomenonal and just for this has become my favorite drawing tool.

Two tools into one. Snappy fast even on OSX, and feels very much native visually.

Tip: Veikk manufactures great 8192 pressure sensitivity A4 size tablets for about 40 to 60 bucks. Packed with extra nibs and everything . Krita and this obscure made of tablets plugged onto a commodity laptop is the best value artist station for all sort of digital work.

How many of us are in the boat where we have thousands of hours on adobe products to unlearn in order to be able to use GIMP without pulling our hair out?

This is precisely why Adobe, Microsoft, and Autodesk give colleges and universities free licenses for their products.

The entire industry of digital tools has hung itself on these magic words: "industry standard".

All the while, free software like Krita, Linux, and Blender have become viable, if not substantially better, alternatives to their proprietary incumbent counterparts. Practically every need that the industry has can be met using free tools. The hardest part is simply convincing people to use them.

Also applies to Matlab.

I don't think it's the issue here. Products like PS, 3DS MAX are VERY intuitive to learn and use "right now because I need to get this done ASAP". Try Blender - you'll feel like on some alien spaceship.

I'm calling BS. Tools like Photoshop and 3DS Max have always been an overwhelming menu of tools, usually with just an arbitrary picture instead of a word! That's as alien as it gets.

The only way to use any of these tools is to learn why. Until you understand what things like "extrude" and "flip normals" mean, you are ultimately fumbling around an alien menu: the best you can do is order everything on it one at a time. You most certainly are not going to, "get this done ASAP."

Blender's UI/UX intentionally avoided this nonsense. Instead, you had to learn the basics. And once you did, it was easy to expand that knowledge; because every tool was well documented and placed into a coherent UX context. The recent UI/UX overhaul only expanded this by adding the "friendly" buttons you are looking for.

I didn't say a complete outsider could use and be proficient with any of these. I was fairly good with 3D overall to begin with.

Actually, I had to repeat the experiment 2 days ago - after not using 3DS for decade. It's almost like a new program. But better. It took me 10 minutes to import a model, take it apart, do basic operations and try to optimize it (unsuccessfully). With no help, no internet, in a hurry and half-asleep. It's just logical. Anyway, the "Getting started" button is right there.

Blender is just freaking scary. But I'm giving it a try once a decade. :)

Gimp has not yet been converted to GTK 3 and now GTK 4 is out.

Gimp looks pretty bad in HiDPI and the GTK 3 build is not yet stable.

Ardour has not yet converted to GTK 3 and now ....

does it matter?

Most of the work has gone into the development head for several years now, so the stable 2.x releases would seem slow and clunky.

The good news is that the 3.0 release is expected to finally happen this year, and hopefully they'll adopt a more frequent release strategy thereon.

I enjoy Krita, especially the Android version which supports everything the desktop version supports as far as I can tell. If you've got an Android tablet with a stylus it's worth checking out, it's on par with most art software I've seen in the Play Store for most purposes I can think of.

If you're on Android, the Play Store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.krita) will tell you it's not compatible with your Android phone.

This actually appears to be false! I downloaded the v8 ARM APK directly [0] and it started up and is working fine.

Enjoy :)

[0] https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.1.5/

Thank goodness for side loading.

Edit: @hallarempt, naturally it isn't perfect on a phone screen, but still works. A mobile-native version would be cool but this is still a lot better than any other Phone-oshop tools I've tried! Kind of depressing to be told it's "incompatible" when in reality it's functional with some limitations.

Yeah... The thing is, the current UI isn't really good for small screens, so when we teamed up with Google to bring Krita to Android and ChromeOS, we only targeted large-screen devices.

We are trying to add a UX suitable for small-screen devices, but... Google changes Android so often and so weirdly that the guy working on Krita on Android pretty much spends all his time chasing those changes instead of designing a small-screen friendly UI.

To be fair, Clip Studio Paint also for the most part chose to port the desktop UI to Android instead of something more touch-friendly, didn't they?

Oh shit I just bought my kid a Moto G Stylus and Krita was part of our game-plan. Is there a bounty I can donate to for this?

You can still sideload it, but a phone-suitable UX is going to take a year, or two, three.

Great, thanks!

I've been trying it on the stylus but it is difficult - f-droid hosts it I think.

it's also in F-Droid https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.krita/

I was actually looking into Krita the other day to see if it's possible for an iOS/iPad build to come out once side-loading is possible on those platforms. From what I can gather[0], it seems like there's already a working iPad build which is exciting. I'm hoping an alternative app store comes out as well to properly pay for it.

[0] https://krita-artists.org/t/in-theory-could-krita-be-ported-...

Krita actually was one of the first programs that implemented multi-layer liquify (yes, before CSP.)

It has its issues tho. For example the text tool is quite tedious to use (and sometimes just gives plain wrong kernings)

Next version will have greatly improved text capabilities.

Do you have any more details?

I feel like Krita is the next best thing after Photoshop, however; the interface really doesn't sit right with me at all. It feels very counter intuitive and I struggle finding what I need. I also don't like that "windows" inside the "main window" isn't really a thing unless you use the software(?) renderer, and even then it's sub-par at best. Like, I want to have 4 or 5 images open and see them all at the same time.

MDI subwindows work fine with canvas acceleration, though...

Yeah seems like that works now. Showing content while dragging however still doesn't work.

As a counterpoint, some years ago I felt it was time to use "a real painting program" and switch to Photoshop. It felt so backwards, mostly in terms of interface, that I dropped the idea very fast. There are a few shortcuts that I change or find missing in Krita, but apart from that it felt like the painting experience was much more streamlined (which is my main concern, so I can't talk for other aspects).

Adobe halted development of painting and illustration features in Photoshop a number of years ago. Their goal seems to be to get people to use Illustrator for illustrations and Fresco for painting.

I got into Krita a year or two ago and I've been thoroughly impressed. Kudos to the development team. I'm particularly happy with its wacom support; the radial menu is something I miss profoundly in Affinity. (I also love Affinity but for different reasons; and yes, there's a system-wide wacom radial menu under Windows, but it's not as good as Krita's.)

I once got a wacom-like tablet but I always wondered how does one learn to use it? And specially using software like Krita or MyPaint in Linux. I mean, supposing you can already draw with pen and paper. But I found it to be somewhat different, and I could never get used to. Maybe it's the lack of practice but also seeing almost no progress made me abandon. Any advice would be appreciated

If you have a paper/pencil practice, some of the fine motor training transfers. But you're right, not all of it! Particularly, the difference in surface friction used to throw me off.

Try starting with a piece of paper taped onto your tablet to reproduce a grabbier, more fricative surface.

Similarly, when working with good old fashioned graphite on paper, try smoother grades of paper, including "rite in the rain" style polymer-sheet paper. This will help you transfer the muscle memory in a stepwise fashion.

HTH

Thanks!

Blind contour sketching. Doing a lot of this trains you to rely on tactility and learned motion instead of watching your hand or watching the cursor. As soon as I did that in the sketchbook for about two weeks daily and came back to the graphics tablet I was cruising through the drawing process.

Thank you, I'll give it a try

I tried switching to it so I had an FOSS alternative to paint.net, but so far it's taking some getting used to.

I really wish paint.net was FOSS - it's perfect.

It's a shame Paint.NET doesn't work in Wine. Gimp can do way too much, Krita is mostly for artists, and the various lightweight MS Paint alternatives lack things like layers. Paint.NET has fulfilled my requirements for quick image editing quite nicely during my Windows days.

However, I wouldn't call it a competitor to Krita. Krita is very much oriented at artists making digital art whereas Paint.NET is much more picture editing oriented.

If not Krita, then what might be a better alternative to Paint.NET?

Pinta served me well, but on modern distributions it's become unstable. I've resorted to GIMP and Photopea these days.

I'm jealous of the image editor built into SerenityOS (PixelPaint). It's getting awfully close to everything I want out of an image editor, but I'm not brave enough to try to port a Serenity application to Linux.

Pinta works just fine as a flatpak. Have you tried that?

It seems to be a lot more stable as a Flatpak! Too bad Flatpak is messed up on my system, but now I have a reason to fix it!

Paint.NET used to be open source until a bunch of scammers started selling "relabeled" versions of it, misleading users.

So its devs decided to join the trend?

I'm not sure how that's better.

Open Office and Libre Office both have been suffering from this problem for years. They remain open source.

More than a decade ago I discussed this with RMS. His position is that these scammers are not a problem, rather they are helping to distribute FOSS software. And in fact, they do provide the source code when requested, I requested and got the code. So, as is usually the case, RMS is technically right even if it is difficult to see. I feel that reputational damage is significant, RMS feels that these scammers are not damaging the reputation of the FOSS software so long as they are not using any of the copyrighted components, such as the name.

Try Pinta, it's pretty close to Paint.net in terms of functionality. But make sure to install it from the repository specified on the website. The version provided by various distributions is very old and unstable.

You know, I did try Pinta before Krita, and I can't remember what but I found it didn't support something I needed.

This is odd to me because I don't really do much other than need layers, a good text tool, and some effects like blur or similar. I might give it a try again, it's been at least a year since I last looked at it.

Multiple steps may be required:

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

Latest is v2.1. Ubuntu 20.04 apt repo is indeed back at v1.6.

It really is.

I started using that when it was launched in 2004 and it's come a very long way. Began as a computer science senior design project.

Unfortunately as you mention it's not open source anymore ... too many people recompiling it and selling it as their own.

It's fast, easy, and has more features than I'll ever need. Plugins also for more advanced things like content-aware fills, etc.

It's not directly comparable to Krita but if you need a powerful, free image editor on Windows it's easily my recommendation.

> Unfortunately as you mention it's not open source anymore ...

> too many people recompiling it and selling it as their own.

What is wrong with that? So long as the license allows it and those selling it respect copyright?

I have recently begun using Krita; being open-source, I did not necessarily have high-expectations, but it absolutely is professional-grade software.

I’m very glad you’re open source. Username checks out ;)

Are there any good AI inpainting and outpainting plugins for Krita?

Also, how well would it work with handling thousands of small picture objects (e.g. placing props on a multi-layer DnD map)?

Yup. Finally switched last year to Krita from GIMP. Was a little awkward with the muscle memory for a bit, but damn, so much slicker. Reminds me of when I went to VSC from NPP and Atom.

I used to use Gimp for photoshop type operations but it's become unusable for me due to slowness, even with a M1 native build. No idea what's up.

Tried Krita and it works great

Are any Krita devs here? I was very eager to replace PS with Krita, but I met a strong obstacle - it doesn't support PSD vectors (paths). This is catastrophic problem for me as 90% of my work contain paths. I was sure it was there, but when I brought my PSD I worked all night on to the linux user to make final tweaks, nothing worked. I was shocked. :( Are there plans to implement this?

Krita is freaking amazing and I use it every day.

if you have an old surface tablet, this is really great with linux surface kernel

[ https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface ]

I love Krita... have been using it for years and have my kids using it as well!

Also I use photopea online because I was so used to old Photoshop

My Photoshop install from a previous life is a major reason I still keep a 15-year-old Mac running.

Krita is really nice but it's an artist's tool, not a general image editor. GIMP is a general image editor but… not really nice.

> My Photoshop install from a previous life is a major reason I still keep a 15-year-old Mac running.

I've debated setting up an offline "creative corner" machine with a comfy older OS and Photoshop, something like Snow Leopard and Photoshop CS1/CS2, precisely because the core of what makes PS useful for me hasn't changed in ages. For my use case the new features added in versions since simply aren't worth the bloat and slowness that's come with them.

There are so many of us with this mindset, if there were usable tools that played well with muscle memory of oldschool adobe workflows the market for new versions of PS in particular and to a lesser extent Illustrator, would fall drastically.

I used to try to port Photoshop to newer OSes etc.

Then I discovered PhotoPea web app online and it’s even better! And available anywhere for free! Have you tried it? Just like Photoshop 5 haha

It's weird seeing this on the top of the frontpage because of how old the app is.

It's great for annotating with symbols and circling stuff, and the "New from clipboard" function is awesome, but the text editor holds it back entirely. It's painful to do ANYTHING with text and they choose not to triage it.

There's a minimum text size, too, so it auto-goes back to that high text size unless you type a number in.

It's not ready for mainstream, I've sent this feedback as many others have.

They promised to redo the text tool last year. It's not released yet, but I'm sure they are at least aware of this issue.

I don't know if the text editor "holds it back entirely" to such an extent as to make it "not ready for mainstream", but definitely is a pain in the ass. I didn't even know adding text to an image could be made so complicated and buggy until I started using Krita.

I see it mainly as an digital painting app and it is advertised by its creators as such ("painting program … art tools"). There, it goes far beyond basic functionality and is very much ready for mainstream.

It does a lot of things beyond that, and some people use it as general purpose tool but given that this is not part of the core purpose, it is not surprising that the mileage varies when it comes to text editing or color correction etc. (Still happy if they manage to improve their text tool!)

Read about the re-written text layout engine: https://wolthera.info/2022/10/svg-text-layout-for-krita

If I read and understand that correctly, they aren't addressing the UX of the editor, but the engine's features instead? Features are nice, but I don't think people want to type their text in a big window before they see it on the canvas.

Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.NET, and even MS paint let you write text directly on the canvas with an insertion point. The Text tool in Krita is a whole level of abstraction away from being able to see what you want.

Yes, on-canvas editing of text is a project for this year, and probably most of next year. All in all we're spending tens of thousands of euros on the text shape and text tool, in the hope that now we're doing this for the fourth time, we can finally nail it.

The main purpose of Krita's text tool is comic book speech bubbles, though, not annotating screen shots.

I make comics and I am pretty sure that a feature set suitable for making word balloons is going to be very much a superset of what you need to annotate screenshots.

Annotation: pick a font/size/color and pick a place to start typing, or drag out a larger, rectangular text box and start typing.

Comics: also those text boxes might need to be ovals/rectangles/some absolutely crazy shape that fits the needs of the page, it's nice to automatically draw a balloon for them too, manage font/size/color across multiple text boxes on multiple pages, and then there's sound effects that start out as a cool font and get pushed around...

I may be biased by working in Illustrator, which has a very mature set of text tools. I hear that Clip/Manga Studio's text tools were barely functional for an embarassing number of years and there sure are a lot of comics people I know who love it despite that.

Clip Studio's text tools are really primitive, yes... And we're aware of the challenges. At least three people in the core team do make comics, too :-) And we want to support vertical text, RTL, ruby and all of that. But in this thread there's a link to a blog post that shows what already has been done, and there's been lots of work done since.

Thank you for being the maintainer, and thanks for this update. You folks are incredible.

Is Krita ready for HDR painting? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35736913 - April 2023 (6 comments)

Krita 5.1 Release Notes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32517739 - Aug 2022 (5 comments)

Krita 5.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29660463 - Dec 2021 (89 comments)

First Beta for Krita 5.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28226681 - Aug 2021 (58 comments)

Krita 4.4.2 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25898325 - Jan 2021 (22 comments)

Krita 4.4.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24775216 - Oct 2020 (138 comments)

Krita, OpenGL and Qt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23878728 - July 2020 (205 comments)

Krita 4.3.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638144 - June 2020 (83 comments)

First Krita Beta for Android and ChromeOS in Play Store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23281634 - May 2020 (127 comments)

Krita Receives Epic MegaGrant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831164 - Dec 2019 (17 comments)

Back from the Blender Conference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21357906 - Oct 2019 (57 comments)

Making crochet animation in Krita and Kdenlive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19485881 - March 2019 (6 comments)

Krita 4.2.0: First painting application with HDR support on Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19388091 - March 2019 (47 comments)

Krita in 2018 and 2019 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18768747 - Dec 2018 (46 comments)

Krita 4.1.3 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18083149 - Sept 2018 (37 comments)

Krita in the Windows Store: an update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651281 - July 2018 (60 comments)

Krita 4.0 – A painting app for cartoonists, illustrators, and concept artists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16647445 - March 2018 (191 comments)

Krita Foundation: Update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14910829 - Aug 2017 (65 comments)

Krita Foundation in Trouble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14899155 - Aug 2017 (226 comments)

An Interview with Krita Maintainer Boudewijn Rempt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13586945 - Feb 2017 (14 comments)

Whew, what a year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290718 - Dec 2016 (23 comments)

Open Source Motion Comic Done Entirely with Blender, Krita and GNU/Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12381924 - Aug 2016 (18 comments)

Krita brushes for game artists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12281408 - Aug 2016 (5 comments)

Krita 3.0: The Animation Release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810802 - May 2016 (43 comments)

First Krita 3.0 pre-alpha - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10920092 - Jan 2016 (1 comment)

Krita – free digital painting app crowd-funding goes live on kickstarter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9484828 - May 2015 (2 comments)

The complete story of Paris-8 university going for Krita, Blender, Natron - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250461 - March 2015 (1 comment)

‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8897835 - Jan 2015 (197 comments)

Krita (open source painting software) is on Kickstarter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7964241 - June 2014 (4 comments)

FOSS Photoshop killer Krita may release on Steam [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7199040 - Feb 2014 (97 comments)

Ten years of working on Krita - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6482242 - Oct 2013 (11 comments)

As a long-time user and supporter of Krita, I'm thrilled to see it mentioned here. However, I must express my concern about the choice of emphasizing "FREE" in all caps in this headline. While I understand that the cost-free nature of open-source software is certainly appealing, I feel that this particular framing could cheapen the overall value proposition of Krita.

Krita has much more to offer than just being free. It's a powerful and versatile painting program, developed by a dedicated team of professionals and volunteers who have worked tirelessly to make it an excellent tool for digital artists. The software offers a wide range of features, including an intuitive user interface, advanced brush engines, and robust layering capabilities. These strengths are what truly set Krita apart and should be the primary focus when promoting it.

By emphasizing the "FREE" aspect in all caps, the headline may inadvertently detract from these strengths and create the perception that Krita's most significant selling point is its price tag, rather than its outstanding functionality and features. I would suggest presenting Krita as a "professional open-source painting program" without the all-caps emphasis on "FREE," so that the conversation around it can focus more on its capabilities and the value it brings to the creative community.

Again, I wholeheartedly support Krita and am grateful for the fantastic work that has been put into it. I hope this critique is received in the caring and thoughtful spirit in which it was intended, as my goal is to ensure that Krita receives the recognition and appreciation it truly deserves.

"“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis. "

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Almost no one uses the term that way, though. Certainly not the vast majority of possible users.

This is entirely unrelated to Krita, but on the "free beer" mention: I had heard free as in beer, and also free as in puppies. But two that I heard recently and loved that make different points: Free as in mattress, and free as in piano.

There's also free as in Jazz, but we're digressing quite far from the topic here.

Stealing this

> Free as in mattress, and free as in piano

I don't get it, could you explain?

the mattress could be infected with bedbugs.

and a piano that's been unmaintained for enough decades isn't an instrument any more, and never will be. and disposing of them is expensive.

they have negative value, despite not costing any money.

Around me free pianos are just worth less than the cost to move them, not that there is anything wrong with them a professional couldn't tune.

I see people trying to sell old Yamaha organs and they lower the price until it becomes "free just take it out of here so I don't have to pay someone to do it."

Huh. Free as in mattress, I got the negative implication.

Free as in piano, thought it was some kind of… I dunno, almost a pun or something. In some places, people will play piano in public, performing for passers by, or just for their own entertainment.

“Free as in beer” has the implication of being probably a bait and switch or having some strings attached. “Free as in speech” has an implication of having some significant political statement; I mean, “free speech” covers trivial speech too of course, but it isn’t how we usually use the expression.

The idea of software more like a funny song that’s been released into the universe is a bit charming. I like my misinterpretation better than the real thing, I think.

Free as in piano... I read that as "ok, you got a free piano, but now you've got to invest a lot of time into learning how to play it". Free as in free book, if you will.

See also the "everything must be paid for twice" article (submitted a while back on HN).

> I read that as "ok, you got a free piano, but now you've got to invest a lot of time into learning how to play it".

Also not the easiest thing to move to where you want to use it, as opposed to wherever it happened to be when it was gifted to you.

I don't get how those help saying what value open source software does or does not give. With the original two there are clearly two ways to view free (beer, as in you do not pay for the software, and speech as in that you get certain rights with it).

You are talking about the quality of the software, and I don't think that is correlated to either the versions of free described above. I have paid for software that has been buginfested and that has been completely unfit for its purpose.

Is any of what you said related to free/libre software?

As a huge fan of GNU and the idea of Free Software;

It might be time to lead with Libre? This rather unfortunate ambiguity causes SO many problems.

Rule of thumb: when you see the phrase "free and open source software" (FOSS), the word "free" in that phrase refers to freedom, not price.

That is the title which is seen on the posted URL from Krita website. Standards for submitting to HN is not to alter the title.

For me it has become a reflex to check, when a product says it is "free", whether they mean no-cost or freedom. Always a little disappointed, when they chose the wording without seemingly knowing about libre.

There is an android version that works on my samsung. While it’s very “desktop”ish it’s amazing with the sylus.

The brushes are fantastic allow quickly painting grass and leaves.

FREE is super important.

There's lots of people in the world who can barely afford their computers, let alone the software to run on it.

Personally I launched my career from a self-education that made heavy use of pirated and open-source software. I would never have been able to buy software without that start.

Amen to that.

We have the same situation at work. We have a couple of fantastic "free" data products that should have a price tag of hundreds of dollars.

I personally mention "Open access enterprise ready data" but it doesn't have the same "oomph" as saying it is free. The product is shared under CC-BY-SA and we geniunely treat it as an enterprise level product with no compromise. But yeah the keyword "free" does dilute the percieved quality of the product.

Why is free the only word that's consistently spelled in all uppercase? All throughout commercial text. It is kind of tacky at this point.

Emulating tacky sleazy ads that have a fine print where you pay $10,000 every day and sell your soul to Satan.

It is a bit weird.

Although, I don’t see “FREE” all that often (other than this case). I see “Free” more often, which I take as making the free as in liberated, not free as in zero cost distinction.

> As a long-time user and supporter of Krita,

How does Krita compare to GIMP?

No the parent comment but I can answer this.

They're quite different. Krita is more about digital painting and GIMP is more about photo processing. If you're familiar with CSP and Photoshop, Krita is more like CSP and GIMP is more like Photoshop.

Specifically, Krita has a much more sophisticated brush engine.

Even for light photo editing and making memes and such, I much prefer Krita over Gimp. I find the interface more straightforward to use. (And in terms of features I prefer Photopea over both, but unfortunately it's not free software.)

Thanks, checking it out.

> the choice of emphasizing "FREE" in all caps in this headline.

You’re welcome to fork it and try to sell it if you think that’s such a great idea.

Anyway are you going to blame the user? I will. It sucks people pay for a $3 coffee or a cigs or chips not software they use for even 10s. Maybe figure out a way to make software physiologically addictive like coffee tobacco and junk food, and you can bypass the two decades of cultural programming of 4b people to value intangibles at 0.

> You’re welcome to fork it and try to sell it if you think that’s such a great idea.

Emphasis mine. Are you implying the OP shouldn't raise these ideas? Have you ever had a complaint about a user interface in your car? You are, after all, free to build your own and design it how you like. They saw something they thought could be improved, provided a rational explanation of why they think a change should at least be considered, and did so in a manner that's very respectful of both the software and the people who developed it. So this comment feels more than a little...reductive to me. Moreover, I don't read their commentary as suggesting the software shouldn't be free, merely that its price tag shouldn't be the loudest and most prominent selling point. It's a well-known psychological phenomenon that people want things they think are valuable, so putting a $5 sign on the furniture you're trying to give away makes it more likely to go.

It's a powerful and versatile painting program, developed by a dedicated team of professionals and volunteers who have worked tirelessly to make it an excellent tool for digital artists. The software offers a wide range of features, including an intuitive user interface, advanced brush engines, and robust layering capabilities. These strengths are what truly set Krita apart and should be the primary focus when promoting it.

This is table stakes for a paint program. Right now all versions of Manga Studio/Clip Studio are $25. Possibly more for the super deluxe version, I'm not sure if it's just currently also $25 or permanently $25. Procreate is $12. ArtRage is $5-80. All of these tools have an "intuitive user interface, advanced brush engines, and robust layering capabilities". All are developed by dedicated teams of pros who have been working to make them excellent tools for digital artists for many years.

Krita is available for free; Krita is partially built by volunteers. These are the only parts of the paragraph I quoted that do not apply to the other tools I cited. There's lots more tools in this space, too; I just listed a few things I see a lot of my pro artist friends using.

Clip is yearly on Android/iOS, one-time on Win/MacOS.

I think there's something going on with an upcoming subscription to updates for Clip on desktops, too? Some of my Clip-using friends were screaming about it a while back.

I recommended Krita to my wife for digital drawing, and Krita stands ahead in the realm of "open source software that is usable by non-maintainers".

Maintainers used loosely as people who participate in the community, filing bug reports and providing forum support.

If you look at something like FreeCAD, equally powerful but not nearly as user friendly, you need to want to use FreeCAD specifically.

With Krita, you just need to want to paint. Its incredibly user friendly for someone with zero experience.

One thing I like about Krita is that it has Mac and Windows versions which aren't terribly clunky.

Digital painting was a skill to learn on my bucket list. Emphasis on "was". Within the last 6 months all of that has changed. I no longer value digital painting as a skill.

It's easy to see why based on everything's that happened in the news. I'm sure a lot of people share my sentiment.

You can still do digital painting while you are in a plane or taking a trip, just because AI advances in this space has made a lot of strides doesn't mean you necessarily have to give up on doing something.

If you seriously take that attitude then it's hardly worth learning to do anything - there will always be someone or some computer who is better at it, so why even try?

Genuine and serious praise for not insisting on sticking with an absurdly embarassing and arguably problematic name that would be likely to hamper adoption for quite some time, unlike a certain other free and open source painting program.

Do you mean Gimp? I don't think that's so relevant. Did Git suffer from the same problem?

The Web is an imperfect corpus, but "git" is less commonly used as an insult. Even once you git rid of all the software references with "git -software -version -torvalds -branch -commit -github -repo -repository" your primary definitions are as a synonym for "get," e.g., the top result is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git!

Compare to "gimp -image -org" where the top result is not only an insult, but an ableist one that would instantly land you a trip to HR.

I guess both are meant to be a kind of joke, calling your software a bad name in jest. But I think the joke works much better in the case of "git". Depending on what you read into it, calling someone a "gimp" is really quite offensive.

git: A silly, incompetent, stupid or annoying person (usually a man).

gimp: A person who is lame due to a crippling of the legs or feet.

GIMP was so named without an awareness that it coincided with pejorative. It wasn't an intentional joke.

The acronym was coined first, with the letter G being added to -IMP as a reference to "the gimp" in the scene from the 1994 Pulp Fiction film.[8]

- Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP#History

The movie in question doesn't even make the pejorative version of the word clear. The best you could come out of it is some weird fetish thing.

I am an artist who is quite happy for part of her living to be "drawing porn" and I find "The GIMP", considered solely as a word for "a weird fetish thing", to be a singularly tacky name.

Sure, but let me be clear, I don't think that matters at all.

Again, I'm pretty sure the reason I always get downvoted to hell on this one is because people think I'm being "the thought police" or something. And I suppose it's kind of like that but not really?

Yes, personally, I do argue slightly against the name, but honestly, I lose no sleep on it on a personal level.

What bothers me the most is that GIMP feels like a huge missed opportunity. As in -- let's say for sake of argument that the creators are strongly attached to the name, I don't know, even if it was named after Richard S. Gimp and you wanted to honor him, so you have a theoretically "bulletproof" reason.

On balance, it still AINT WORTH IT. You guys had a SERIOUS shot of eating Adobe's lunch and strongly spreading a much better way to do picture editing, but you screwed it up by staying inside your own bubble. The name was just NOT WORTH KEEPING.

Does GIMP have a bigger market share in non-English speaking places? Because if it does, then maybe the name is to be blamed. But if usage is similar everywhere, the name does not seem to matter much, or at all, for the (lack of) success.

I don't think this is a useful metric; the problem with how tech scales is that multiplicative effects are hard to measure.

But as someone who works in IT between tech folk and regular folk, I immediately percieve that a great number of liminal regular folk are going to 100% nope out of a terrible name like this. Might as well call it Poopy Edit or something like that.

So when people do not understand the meaning of a word and not care about it, because they do not speak that language, the metric is useless instead of a test of "everything else but the name".

My, small but non zero, experience says the reason these speakers of other language declined to use it was because it lacked features and sometimes because "piracy is also free". They pointed the brush system was basic, PS already had effects they used a lot. No adjustment layers, styles or layer groups to be more efficient. Slow processing because it operated in full data always, while PS solved preview first and the rest in background. And many other things. The Mac ones found no issues with the windowing system (no MDI mode then, with everything wrapped by big window), because it matched more what they were used to, but Windows users found it bad because their OS is not designed for it. None cared about what Gimp or Wilber words are, it was "a poor PS clone with a croissant dog mascot".

The name means “Chalk”, and has the same root as “Cretaceous” (the geological period).

What is absurd and problematic about GIMP?

Off the top of my head: the word "gimped" is similar in meaning to "handicapped", and if someone "is a gimp", then that could be considered similar to saying someone "is a cripple". Although I have no clue what any of that has to do with Krita.

How is Gimp any different from Nintendo using 'Wii'?

Does "Wii" have some possibly 'offensive' meaning I'm unaware of?

It's slang for urination and sometimes, slightly less frequently, a penis. Tends to be used more by children.

Oh, very different then. The Wii is quite literally also used more by children.

GIMP is professional quality software, and no one will believe it because of the name.

GIMP's name is great. Had it chosen any other, it would not have stuck in my mind for almost twenty years. The "Ummm akshyually GIMP is an evil slur" crowd is the same as the "Blacklist LITERALLY murders blacks with racism" crowd, so I see very little reason to take it seriously.

Again, wrong -- I'm addressing a different crowd here. As a black person, I'm mostly with you on e.g. blacklist.

I'm thinking about "people in the middle who might pick this up." It's not that it's offensive and hurtful and protecting feelings and whatnot and that's the primary problem.

It's that "possibly offensive" here equates to "incredibly unprofessional."

GIMP is professional quality software and a LOT OF PEOPLE WONT BELIEVE THAT owing to the name. A decent analogy is if it were called Poopy Edit or something like that.

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