
Ten years of working on Krita - hnha
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/kde/krita_10_years.html
======
galaktor
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/](http://mypaint.intilinux.com/) [2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRaster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRaster)

~~~
buovjaga
The About Krita booklet says: "Krita is pervasively multithreaded and can use
all cores in a multicore machine."
[http://krita.org/aboutkrita26.pdf](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...](http://kde.6490.n7.nabble.com/Krita-performance-
td1530904.html)

~~~
galaktor
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.

~~~
hdevalence
> 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.

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

~~~
hdevalence
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.

~~~
galaktor
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](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.

------
pekk
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.

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

