3 ms·

The problem here to me is that Krita is simply a mess. Krita is supposedly part of the KDE project, which is committed to switching to wayland, but has 0 wayla

The problem here to me is that Krita is simply a mess. Krita is supposedly part of the KDE project, which is committed to switching to wayland, but has 0 wayland support. In practice, that means that if you use other input devices they can have bugs that make it unusable. So it's Linux story is weak. A very bad start for a KDE app...but at least maybe on Windows it works well. Well the problem then is it does the classic blender thing of having non standard shortcuts and usage modes, except unlike blender it does so for literally no reason. Buttons in most of these programs, for certain classes of operations are standardized, and Krita just works differently for the fun of it. No justifications, just "spend a long time changing it if you want it different." The icons are also incredibly ugly and people get defensive about them. The QT thememing is fine, but the actual icons for brushes and the like look amateurish at best and really brings down the cohesiveness of the program. Certain tools are also abysmal to use. The text tool is a joke. Then you have certain operations being incredibly slow. I have worked as a professional artist for years. People here really seem to be implying photoshop is the "big dog" in the space, but this simply isn't true. I see far more CSP users than Photoshop users and among my coworkers and haven't used photoshop for anything but some post processing for years. Krita then needs to compete with CSP, and Procreate (which has gotten huge recently.) To be frank, it doesn't. CSP works mediocorely with Wine but because the input problems don't exist that exist with Krita I have taken to using that on Linux ironically because I use KDE. Krita is basically a non option for me at this point and has me considering making a GPU accelerated open source drawing app instead of suffering this current atrocious landscape.

danShumway 3y ago
I don't have a huge amount of experience with Krita's Wayland performance because the situation on Wayland is still sub-optimal for art in general. Tablet support has gotten much better, but configuration per-app or tied to the desktop environment still seems to be a big issue. The idea that my tablet configuration might stop working if I switch off of a desktop environment is kind of a non-starter to me. It stinks because I really want to use Wayland, but even as recently as a month ago I tried to see if I could make the switch and couldn't. Truthfully, if someone has a lot of money to dump around, devoting a few full-time developers or dropping cash on https://github.com/OpenTabletDriver/OpenTabletDriver https://github.com/OpenTabletDriver/OpenTabletDriver would probably go a long way towards encouraging Wayland adoption from artists. As far as I can tell the issue is not that Wayland can't do tablet control on the same level as X11, it's that the tools built around those capabilities still seem immature. OpenTabletDriver looks very promising but seems to have limited device support, limited in no small part by what tablets the devs have access to (my Cintiq 32 is unlikely to get added any time soon because it is no longer being sold and was expensive and uncommon when it was on the market -- which probably means I should try to do it, but it's been tough to find the time). The NVIDIA situation is also a problem, but there's nothing anyone can do about that other than yell at NVIDIA more. ---- > The text tool is a joke. The text tool should see considerable improvement soon; the entire text engine got rewritten in the last release, the devs just only had time to get it to feature parity with the existing tools.
- yuukisenshi 3y ago
  I'm willing to deal with the Linuxisms of being on Linux (wayland having bad tablet support and controls, I agree with you!) but the fact that on top of that Krita works particularly bad on KDE's default setup, whereas using CSP with Wine is a better experience is absurdity to me.
mcpackieh 3y ago
Krita has issues with X too. Using X11/libinput touchpad: pinch-to-zoom doesn't work in Krita but does work in KDE's ms paint clone Kolourpaint. I've also found Krita to be unsatisfactory for drawing pixel art. Select the pixel art brush and set it to be 3px wide, then draw a rectangle with the rectangle tool. This creates a rectangle with inexplicably jagged edges (http://0x0.st/HWyi.jpg http://0x0.st/HWyi.jpg). Turn off sharpness for the brush and try again, it seems to work now but selecting the background color with the similar color selection tool will reveal that the jagged edges are still present but very faint (http://0x0.st/HWyz.jpg http://0x0.st/HWyz.jpg). All of this happens with a 3px brush but not a 2px brush. It's bizarre. I suppose most digital painters don't notice/care about this, but it's a deal breaker for me. I dislike the Krita icons as well. I would like colorful icons so my eyes can scan them quickly but some halfwit designer got it in their head that all the icons should be monochrome and there doesn't seem to be any way I can choose or create other icon themes. I really want to like Krita, but it just doesn't work with me. All I really want is "MS Paint but with layers" but that's evidently too much to ask on Linux. I've tried more than a dozen painting programs and they're all disappointing.
- yuukisenshi 3y ago
  Same. I'm just using Windows programs now with wine that aren't 100% there, but closer than anything Linux native I have found. The exception is for pixel art, Aseprite works fine for me. https://imgur.com/a/88N1QKd https://imgur.com/a/88N1QKd Example of it on Linux with a decent theme.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Thanks for the Aseprite suggestion, I initially overlooked it due to the license and neglected to reconsider it after exhausting my FOSS options. This is indeed pretty good.

danShumway 3y ago

I don't have a huge amount of experience with Krita's Wayland performance because the situation on Wayland is still sub-optimal for art in general. Tablet support has gotten much better, but configuration per-app or tied to the desktop environment still seems to be a big issue. The idea that my tablet configuration might stop working if I switch off of a desktop environment is kind of a non-starter to me. It stinks because I really want to use Wayland, but even as recently as a month ago I tried to see if I could make the switch and couldn't. Truthfully, if someone has a lot of money to dump around, devoting a few full-time developers or dropping cash on https://github.com/OpenTabletDriver/OpenTabletDriver https://github.com/OpenTabletDriver/OpenTabletDriver would probably go a long way towards encouraging Wayland adoption from artists. As far as I can tell the issue is not that Wayland can't do tablet control on the same level as X11, it's that the tools built around those capabilities still seem immature. OpenTabletDriver looks very promising but seems to have limited device support, limited in no small part by what tablets the devs have access to (my Cintiq 32 is unlikely to get added any time soon because it is no longer being sold and was expensive and uncommon when it was on the market -- which probably means I should try to do it, but it's been tough to find the time). The NVIDIA situation is also a problem, but there's nothing anyone can do about that other than yell at NVIDIA more. ---- > The text tool is a joke. The text tool should see considerable improvement soon; the entire text engine got rewritten in the last release, the devs just only had time to get it to feature parity with the existing tools.

yuukisenshi 3y ago
I'm willing to deal with the Linuxisms of being on Linux (wayland having bad tablet support and controls, I agree with you!) but the fact that on top of that Krita works particularly bad on KDE's default setup, whereas using CSP with Wine is a better experience is absurdity to me.

mcpackieh 3y ago

Krita has issues with X too. Using X11/libinput touchpad: pinch-to-zoom doesn't work in Krita but does work in KDE's ms paint clone Kolourpaint. I've also found Krita to be unsatisfactory for drawing pixel art. Select the pixel art brush and set it to be 3px wide, then draw a rectangle with the rectangle tool. This creates a rectangle with inexplicably jagged edges (http://0x0.st/HWyi.jpg http://0x0.st/HWyi.jpg). Turn off sharpness for the brush and try again, it seems to work now but selecting the background color with the similar color selection tool will reveal that the jagged edges are still present but very faint (http://0x0.st/HWyz.jpg http://0x0.st/HWyz.jpg). All of this happens with a 3px brush but not a 2px brush. It's bizarre. I suppose most digital painters don't notice/care about this, but it's a deal breaker for me. I dislike the Krita icons as well. I would like colorful icons so my eyes can scan them quickly but some halfwit designer got it in their head that all the icons should be monochrome and there doesn't seem to be any way I can choose or create other icon themes. I really want to like Krita, but it just doesn't work with me. All I really want is "MS Paint but with layers" but that's evidently too much to ask on Linux. I've tried more than a dozen painting programs and they're all disappointing.

yuukisenshi 3y ago
Same. I'm just using Windows programs now with wine that aren't 100% there, but closer than anything Linux native I have found. The exception is for pixel art, Aseprite works fine for me. https://imgur.com/a/88N1QKd https://imgur.com/a/88N1QKd Example of it on Linux with a decent theme.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Thanks for the Aseprite suggestion, I initially overlooked it due to the license and neglected to reconsider it after exhausting my FOSS options. This is indeed pretty good.