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25 Years of Krita

krita.org

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Re: 25 Years of Krita

#61

Wow. I could've sworn Krita was only around 6 years old. I've only very recently started hearing about it.

There seems to be a phenomena I observe in the FOSS community where we reflexively respond to suggestions despite them being far beneath their FOSS alternatives. Only after digging or running into issues, do you find the good stuff. Brand name -> Low quality, highly mentioned -> High quality, rarely mentioned Photoshop-> GIMP -> Krita Windows -> Debian-family/Ubuntu/Mint -> Fedora I almost feel like a religious Zealo…

Krita > GIMP, absolutely, but unfortunately both of them are centuries behind any proprietary software despite only being decades old. And I'm not even talking about PAID proprietary software. Free apps are also better.

A frequent issue with FOSS is that they can handle a variety of edge cases because some technical person needed it once and went through the trouble of implementing it, but they offer a subpar experience at basic cases.

They'll add a feature because it was in the bug tracker and then say "it's done," and you need to hold a committee for 6 months in the forum to change anything in it. Meanwhile a proprietary app made by 1 person will gain 30 different niceties to the basic feature in 1 week.

It's just very hard to imagine how an application that existed for 20 years can't select multiple layers at once or reorder its brushes. It almost feels like abandonware at this point, despite them getting new features from time to time.

Re: 25 Years of Krita

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora and Debian (stable) are not really directly comparable, they have different goals. Fedora is essentially a beta channel for RedHat, equivalent to Debian Unstable/testing. Fedora will ship a more up-to-date desktop, but Debian will be better for servers and/or users who don't need the latest Gnome.

> Fedora will ship a more up-to-date desktop, but Debian will be better for servers This is the problem, people are recommending Debian-family for desktop. I don't think people are really talking about server linux, that is almost a solved problem.

Last time I wanted to try Fedora, it didn't ship some packages I wanted to use that Debian sid shipped, and Debian sid is similarly up-to-date in many stuff (they don't ship plasma 6 yet though, even in sid).

I think Debian sid is underappreciated as a decent rolling release distro. I get that Debian doesn't advertise it that way, but it virtually never breaks for me.

Re: 25 Years of Krita

#63
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just any big framework. Porting a large codebase between major releases of GTK (or Javascript frameworks) isn't much better.

Honestly the major open source native Widgets frameworks suck (for C/C++) MFC is slightly better, and MFC sucks (at least on MSVC 6.0 era) WxWidgets was one of the best/easiest OSS ones. The best library hands down was the one used by Borland C++ Builder (Windows only), VCL. QT felt like going around in circles and a bit like those "useless superpower" charts, GTK like nobody had invented C++ yet.

I really think it's holding desktop Linux back. I was making windows apps when I was kid using Visual Studio. There is no way I'd be able to with any of Linux frameworks. The closest thing would probably be to use Java.

Re: 25 Years of Krita

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos for finding a screenshot on Wiki that hasn't been downsized to a postage stamp. For some reason they aggressively enforced a new policy a couple of years ago, and now many of the screenshots are tiny. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vchat.PNG What a shame to lose useful illustrations of software history.

It says there the policy for shrinking down that screenshot is due to it being Microsoft copyrighted content. Probably for other copyrighted content as well. But Krita and other FOSS don't enforce this rule.

Seems a strange rule though, there are countless other websites hosting screenshots of copyrighted software. Surely it is well covered under fair use, if there needs be any legal basis.

Re: 25 Years of Krita

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Fedora better than Debian? (genuinely curious)

Faster, feature rich, less bugs, things just work. Debian-family will have you running into hardware issues, peripheral issues, software conflicts, and using the terminal to update/install things. I used to think Linux was cheap/knockoff Windows.... No, that was just Debian-family. Fedora is better than Windows.

As somebody who has the family using debian for decades now, I am very averse to trying out a new daily driver. Of course if it really is better and not just a different way of going about things, it is worth a try. But this comment gives me no real information, just an opinionated take without pointing to anything specific other than I might need to use apt, which I like. The hardware, software, peripheral comments seem odd or at least about seven years out of date, since I rarely have trouble with any of that and many vendors focus on publishing Debian compatible drivers / software as their only Linux contrib, so they actually get things before other distros in many instances.

Re: 25 Years of Krita

#66
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In their example Photoshop was "brand name", while Gimp was "low quality" and Krita was "high quality".

I see that now. For some reason I read the first arrow as the arrow of implication.

Photoshop is also low quality, in its own special ways, but it's a different topic.

Re: 25 Years of Krita

#67

I use Krita for Photoshop-type stuff, and it works great. It is the only good solution I've found in FOSS-land for animated GIFs, and finding it made it easier to wean off Photoshop. Not even commercial alternatives to Photoshop offer frame-based GIF editing. But Krita, fortunately, does. I know they have a different focus these days, but it'd be nice if they promoted this.

Photoshop can do GIF editing per frame. At least, my old copy of CS2 could.

It just represents each frame as a single layer in the stack, and then combines them in order on export to GIF.

Nowhere near as nice as using an animation tool-style horizontal timeline, but it does work in a pinch.

Re: 25 Years of Krita

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Krita is a great replacement for photoshop. No it is not. Krita was meant to be an OSS alternative to Corel (ex Fractal Design, ex Meta Creations) Painter [1]. And that's what it became, eventually. And quite a bit more. I've been using Photoshop and Krita since the first version of both of these DCC apps came out (and Painter too, btw). Professionally. I.e. for most of my adult life. Krita is a great paint app. It…

Would it be accurate to say that Krita is a Procreate alternative?

I don't know Procreate well enough to answer this conclusively.

But one thing I can say is that using a tablet with a pressure/angle/etc.-sensitive pen and a screen in front of you, is very different from drawing on paper.

Which is very similar, as far as hand/eye coordination and motor memory go, to using a pen with a tablet or a tablet with a built-in screen (e.g. a Wacom Cintiq).

I.e. if you own such a tablet and use it with Krita you may get something very similar to Procreate and call it an alternative.

But if you just own a normal tablet and a screen, learning the hand-eye coordination usually takes six months, from my experience.

That's not really related to the app when you compare desktop painting/image editing apps.

But it matters when it's one of the main features (similarity to pen & paper as far as learning goes).

As is the case with Procreate.

Re: 25 Years of Krita

#69
post #37

What a self-indulgent writeup. The article came nowhere near answering the central question: what are the devs doing other than constantly changing the name of the project and how is this thing better than gimp.

> constantly changing the name of the project

Oh, I didn't know that Krita used to be called something else. I can't find any details of what its name was before it was Krita though; do you happen to know what it was?

Re: 25 Years of Krita

#70

I use Krita for Photoshop-type stuff, and it works great. It is the only good solution I've found in FOSS-land for animated GIFs, and finding it made it easier to wean off Photoshop. Not even commercial alternatives to Photoshop offer frame-based GIF editing. But Krita, fortunately, does. I know they have a different focus these days, but it'd be nice if they promoted this.

Photoshop can do GIF editing per frame. At least, my old copy of CS2 could. It just represents each frame as a single layer in the stack, and then combines them in order on export to GIF. Nowhere near as nice as using an animation tool-style horizontal timeline, but it does work in a pinch.

More recent versions of Photoshop have a frame-based editing setup that can be modified by hand, allowing use of filters and similar tools. This feature has essentially been ignored by every commercial alternative to Photoshop (Affinty, Pixelmator, etc.), which is why I don’t use them. I edit a lot of GIFs.

Krita allows you to import videos or even other GIFs as frame-based animations, which you can then modify to your desire, even adding things like filters or layering images.

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