25 Years of Krita!

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on May 31, 2024,
updated Jun 01, 2024

Quoting: 25 Years of Krita! | Krita —

Twenty-five years. A quarter century. That's how long we've been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck.

I only became part of Krita in 2003, when Krita was still part of KDE's suite of productivity applications, KOffice, later renamed to Calligra... And I became maintainer of Krita in 2004, when Patrick Julien handed over the baton. That means that I've been around Krita for about twenty of those twenty-five years, so I'll hope you, dear reader, will forgive me for making this a really personal post; a very large part of my life has been tied up with Krita, and it's going to show.

But let’s first go back to before when I needed a digital painting application; the first seeds for Krita were laid in 1998, even earlier than the first bits of code. There was this excitement around Linux back then, and there were lots of projects that attempted to create great applications for Linux. One of those projects was GIMP, and another project was Qt. The first was a digital image manipulation application, the other was a toolkit to create user-friendly applications in C++. But GIMP didn't use Qt, it used its home-grown user interface toolkit (although it originally used Motif, which wasn't open source). A Qt fan, Matthias Ettrich, did an experimental port of GIMP to Qt, and gave a presentation about it at the 1998 Linux Kongress. That wasn't received well, and resulted in the kind of spat that is typical of the open source community. People were young and tempers were hot.

Read on

Update

David Revoy:

• Happy 25th anniversary, Krita!

  2024-05-31, Edit: An addition that needs to be made here, thanks to this comment from KDE developer Carl Schwan. I was wrong in the previous paragraph. Plasma 6 can also run on X11, and more surprisingly, KDE Plasma 5's previously full-featured graphics tablet configuration plugin has been adapted for Plasma 6 and can run on it. But it is only for Plasma 6 running under X11 session, the plugin will not work under Wayland session.

LWN:

• 25 Years of Krita

  The developers of the Krita painting application are celebrating 25 years of development with a detailed history of the project. A quarter century. That's how long we've been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was