Ten years of working on Krita | Hacker News Reader

Ten years of working on Krita

valdyas.org

67 pointshnha11 comments

I love Krita. When I moved my personal computing into Linux, one of my concerns was that I might have to continue to use ArtRage in a Windows VM - that was until I found Krita. Similar goes for MyPaint [1] by the way, which emphasizes simpler, more streamlined UX but is a bit slimmer in terms of functionality.

I like how Krita, MyPaint and Gimp all interoperate quite nicely thanks to the OpenRaster format [2].

If I had a naive-uninformed-user-request, I'd wish both would leverage multi-core CPU and GPU power a bit more. Things which appear to be rather simple get really sluggish once you're working on higher-res canvas with many layers.

Nonetheless, kudos to one brilliant open source project.

[1] http://mypaint.intilinux.com/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRaster

The About Krita booklet says: "Krita is pervasively multithreaded and can use all cores in a multicore machine." http://krita.org/aboutkrita26.pdf

The Krita devs have talked about using OpenCL to speed things up with hi-res canvases: http://kde.6490.n7.nabble.com/Krita-performance-td1530904.ht...

thanks for the links. I was aware that they make use of it, just not how much. I recently got a Haswell i7 and was hoping to see more perf; the devs use Intel GPUs as well, and Haswell/Iris have very good OpenCL performance. Maybe their OpenCL work will make a notable difference in future versions.

> Haswell/Iris have very good OpenCL performance.

Not on Linux. Intel only supports using OpenCL on the Xeon Phi coprocessors if you're using Linux.

Iris OpenCL support is restricted to Windows.

well that sucks. I'm curious, is that a driver limitation? how do they restrict it from working in linux?

Intel simply doesn't provide an OpenCL implementation on Linux, and there's no free one (as yet, and for the future).

OpenCL support on Linux is an unmitigated disaster; I worked with it this summer in a different KDE program. I wouldn't get your hopes up.

after reading around a bit [1], I get the impression that while the situation isn't great, it isn't a hopeless disaster, either. Apparently there's Linux drivers but only x64, and not in a Ubuntu-friendly format. Hopefully this will change. I'll play around with it a bit, to see how bad it really is first hand :-)

thanks

[1] http://mhr3.blogspot.ie/2013/06/opencl-on-ubuntu-1304.html

Edit: apparently the drivers that are available for Linux don't support HD or Iris GPUs.

Incidentally, this is one of those programs which drags in an entire desktop's worth of dependencies (KDE) in order to function. (This much more than depending on Qt)

A downside of this decision is that such a project would not be able to survive the death of the desktop it is nailed to. To make a more lasting contribution, don't force people to install your favorite desktop.

Maybe this is one of the reasons the dependencies are being split up http://dot.kde.org/2013/09/25/frameworks-5 (for KDE generally; I imagine Krita would benefit though know no details).

KDE brings a lot of goodies like KIO. You don't have to use the desktop in question, just install the libs.

Krita runs fine on other Linux/Unix desktop environments and also on Windows; this is just a baseless comment.

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