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Since the article spends a lot of time talking about Krita, I want to throw some praise its way as well. I moved over to Krita from Clip Studio when I decided to go pure-Linux on all of my computers, not because I thought the software was particularly competitive or good, but because I thought it was the most likely candidate to become competitive and good. Krita still has a lot of rough edges, but I see it on a simi…
Blender fixed problems of UI/UX with brand new UI => ton of new sponsors
Linux Desktop users do indeed seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time bickering about which popular apps best fulfill their purity tests: whether the app is "free" enough for their liking (MIT vs GPL-based license, etc), whether it picked the "right" frontend in the never-ending GTK vs QT battle, whether it is written in an "acceptable" language (Electron being Satan Incarnate, of course), whether it has been…
> whether it has been properly packaged as a DEB/RPM/Snap/Flatpak/AUR/AppImage, etc. Not sure if you're referring to a choice between packaging formats, or not packaging at all. If the latter, well, it's pretty tiring looking through a list of filenames which contains the platform and arch, downloading the correct one, then going to the project's wik and copy/pasting commands to create users, create systemd files etc…
My personal experience is that it means, at the minimum, having a VM for that distro hot and ready to go, reading a bunch of documentation about how that distro does packaging, consulting an oracle to tell you which versions of that distro you should target, learning how this particular distro wraps your particular build system, translating all the dependencies, etc.
So it doesn’t seem like just “some time” to me. If you pass this off to a maintainer for that distro, they’re usually fairly experienced with that distro’s ecosystems and the tools.
The real budget is likely much higher than the article suggest, especially now that Ubuntu fully switched to Gnome.
I installed Blender at the school I work at because it had an MSI installer. Did not install Krita because it did not. If you want it to be the default used in schools, make it as easy to deploy as possible. The gimp fork Glimpse is planning an MSI installer, so that'll be installed soon
Is it really easier to install compared to an exe installer (say nsis / inno-based)? How so?
On Linux Desktop funding: companies like Red Hat and Canonical fund much of the development on things like GNOME. The real budget is likely much higher than the article suggest, especially now that Ubuntu fully switched to Gnome.
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but not on Gnome
Since the article spends a lot of time talking about Krita, I want to throw some praise its way as well. I moved over to Krita from Clip Studio when I decided to go pure-Linux on all of my computers, not because I thought the software was particularly competitive or good, but because I thought it was the most likely candidate to become competitive and good. Krita still has a lot of rough edges, but I see it on a simi…
Most of the migrations I've seen have been from PS/SAI to CSP. There are a ton of artists creating custom brushes for CSP now, and you can't import them into Krita. If you're in a particular artist community/discord and want help, no one is going to know what you're talking about. That's classic lock-in.
CSP and Procreate are the hot tools on the Twitter/Instagram scene right now and I don't see the growth slowing. Krita ATM is unfortunately perceived as an outlier tool, like Medibang or FireAlpaca.
It probably isn't an issue to you personally, but those are the factors I see stymying adoption (and to be honest, I have literally never met another artist using Krita)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> whether the app is "free" enough for their liking (MIT vs GPL-based license, etc), I know it is tangential to this point, but a lot of developers, including long time Free Software developers, don't get licensing at all . While packaging software (FOSS) for a distribution, I've had to poke multiple people to fix licensing problems that invariably occurred (most common: incompatible licensing of parts of a project,…
> a lot of developers, including long time Free Software developers, don't get licensing at all Completely agree; it's a complex part of producing software that people (myself being guilty of this) incorrectly assume they can ignore. > There are legitimate technical reasons for not liking Electron, not necessarily due to "disproportionate amount of time bickering" spent by "Linux Desktop users". There are legitimate…
I distinctly remember a post on here about three or four years ago where a blind person detailed losing their job because Electron does not integrate with desktop accessibility functions.
I installed Blender at the school I work at because it had an MSI installer. Did not install Krita because it did not. If you want it to be the default used in schools, make it as easy to deploy as possible. The gimp fork Glimpse is planning an MSI installer, so that'll be installed soon
This is a little bit surprising to me, at $DAYJOB i had some requests for an MSI installer. I knew there's some AD/GPO features or whatever but your level of seriousness here is unexpected. Is it really easier to install compared to an exe installer (say nsis / inno-based)? How so?
Since the article spends a lot of time talking about Krita, I want to throw some praise its way as well. I moved over to Krita from Clip Studio when I decided to go pure-Linux on all of my computers, not because I thought the software was particularly competitive or good, but because I thought it was the most likely candidate to become competitive and good. Krita still has a lot of rough edges, but I see it on a simi…
They've done an admirable job on Krita, but I don't feel the same optimism about adoption. There is a social element to these things Krita is severely lacking. Most of the migrations I've seen have been from PS/SAI to CSP. There are a ton of artists creating custom brushes for CSP now, and you can't import them into Krita. If you're in a particular artist community/discord and want help, no one is going to know what…
That being said (and keep in mind I am only one fallible data-point) the community situation is roughly equivalent to what I remember Blender being like when I first started using it (maybe in 2007-2008).
- Very few professionals were using Blender, if any.
- Most tools were being written for Maya. Every time someone would link a cool tech product with crowd simulations or plant growth, it would always be a Maya plugin.
- Any college/high-school modeling/animation courses you took would be using Maya.
- That meant that if someone wanted to learn professional animation/modeling, they'd learn Maya's paradigms, and then Blender would seem extra weird. This was back when you just had to get used to the weird 3d cursor.
- Compatibility between the two programs was awful. I remember wrestling with the options to get 3D models to export in a format that wouldn't be completely messed up when imported in Unity. I don't remember if I ever got it working.
There were people who used Blender because it was free and swore that it was just as powerful once you got used to it, but they were largely techy people. And even if they were right, none of the digital artists or studios who's work I really respected cared at all. If you wanted to get an actual job with animation, you used Maya, period. Only hobbyists could afford to spend the time learning a separate program.
So it doesn't bother me too much to see Krita in the same position. I care more about the trajectory/velocity of development, and who I see using the software. I see a lot of programmers using software like Gimp, but I see a larger focus from Krita on actual artists, and a more pragmatic prioritization of features artists use.
If the core community stays really friendly for artists, and they keep on releasing at their current pace, then I suspect adoption will eventually come. Or at least, I think it's a decent enough bet that I'm willing to use the software in its current state and regularly throw money at its development.