I love that they are also selling the software in stores (MS, Steam, Epic). You don't get anything extra apart from the automatic updates but it's certainly a nice way to get people to pay for your FOSS project.
I wish more project would do the same. I know the stores take a cut but my guess would be that it's easier to make people buy there than make them a direct donation for example.
I follow their updates semi-regularly so I'm not sure if they made a more recent one that was as detailed. I found a tad depressing to see how much Steam purchases are making compared to donations.
Right, I remember the issue... which I think got you to do the proper setup of the Krita foundation to avoid any similar issue (which may have been quite some work and accountant fees).
Thank you for your work, by the way. Krita is one of the things that make me the happiest, with Linux itself. It's such a well-designed software, and it's such a pleasure to paint with it.
> I found a tad depressing to see how much Steam purchases are making compared to donations.
Why's this depressing? They 'charge' a reasonable price on Steam for those who want to either support the project or get automatic updates or both, and the developers for this open source project get funded without having to actually paywall the product. Seems pretty good all around to me!
I think it's the same situation with companies paying for software from a company they already have a spending relationship with instead of trying the competition. You lose a lot of people when you ask them to get their card out for yet another entity. It's easier to buy into the nth AWS tool, or Office 365 app, or Steam game than to take a chance with some new person's grasp on security and privacy.
Aseprite calls itself "source available" now. Their license has a "no redistribute" clause, so if want to use it and can't compile it yourself, you have to buy it.
I spent about an hour trying to compile it on Windows a few months ago, couldn't get it working. Can't remember why, maybe most of that time was installing requirements.
From memory, one of their dependencies (maybe skia?) was a gigantic pain to build. I also wasn't very familiar with ninja, and couldn't debug some of the ninja output from cmake.
Doesn't really matter because I already had a license, but it would have been interesting to play around with the internals.
Decompilation is not the same as source availability. Any binary can be converted into source that will compile back into a (nearly) equivalent binary. Whether that source code is economically viable to use in some derivative work is an entirely different question. It might be easier for .NET binaries to be decompiled but the point still remains that machine generated source code is not the same as human generated source code.
There is a colossal difference between attempting to decompile a native binary (using a tool like Ghidra) and decompiling a .NET binary. .NET binaries contain all the information necessary to express the original program, except for local variable names.
You are left with something highly readable that will build correctly. Unlike native code disassemblies which need to guess at data types and stack usage.
Same. I find gimp even lagging behind photoshop which itself can be a clog. A shame since Gimp is a fantastic app.
Krita is a complete replacement at this point. And, its features caters to drawing/painting to a greater degree than photoshop, by far. The brush engine is phenomenonal and just for this has become my favorite drawing tool.
Two tools into one. Snappy fast even on OSX, and feels very much native visually.
Tip: Veikk manufactures great 8192 pressure sensitivity A4 size tablets for about 40 to 60 bucks. Packed with extra nibs and everything . Krita and this obscure made of tablets plugged onto a commodity laptop is the best value artist station for all sort of digital work.
How many of us are in the boat where we have thousands of hours on adobe products to unlearn in order to be able to use GIMP without pulling our hair out?
This is precisely why Adobe, Microsoft, and Autodesk give colleges and universities free licenses for their products.
The entire industry of digital tools has hung itself on these magic words: "industry standard".
All the while, free software like Krita, Linux, and Blender have become viable, if not substantially better, alternatives to their proprietary incumbent counterparts. Practically every need that the industry has can be met using free tools. The hardest part is simply convincing people to use them.
I don't think it's the issue here.
Products like PS, 3DS MAX are VERY intuitive to learn and use "right now because I need to get this done ASAP". Try Blender - you'll feel like on some alien spaceship.
I'm calling BS. Tools like Photoshop and 3DS Max have always been an overwhelming menu of tools, usually with just an arbitrary picture instead of a word! That's as alien as it gets.
The only way to use any of these tools is to learn why. Until you understand what things like "extrude" and "flip normals" mean, you are ultimately fumbling around an alien menu: the best you can do is order everything on it one at a time. You most certainly are not going to, "get this done ASAP."
Blender's UI/UX intentionally avoided this nonsense. Instead, you had to learn the basics. And once you did, it was easy to expand that knowledge; because every tool was well documented and placed into a coherent UX context. The recent UI/UX overhaul only expanded this by adding the "friendly" buttons you are looking for.
I didn't say a complete outsider could use and be proficient with any of these. I was fairly good with 3D overall to begin with.
Actually, I had to repeat the experiment 2 days ago - after not using 3DS for decade. It's almost like a new program. But better. It took me 10 minutes to import a model, take it apart, do basic operations and try to optimize it (unsuccessfully). With no help, no internet, in a hurry and half-asleep. It's just logical. Anyway, the "Getting started" button is right there.
Blender is just freaking scary. But I'm giving it a try once a decade. :)
Agreed. Just made the switch over to Krita from Gimp for some simple workflows. Everything feels much faster across Mac, Windows, and Linux. Also the tools somehow make a bit more sense out of the box.
I may start doing the same, at least when the tool-sets overlap.
Any experience using it's python scripting tools? I've done some scripting with gimp, but the documentation is really really poor and it was a much more frustrating experience than it ought to have been.
I enjoy Krita, especially the Android version which supports everything the desktop version supports as far as I can tell. If you've got an Android tablet with a stylus it's worth checking out, it's on par with most art software I've seen in the Play Store for most purposes I can think of.
Edit: @hallarempt, naturally it isn't perfect on a phone screen, but still works. A mobile-native version would be cool but this is still a lot better than any other Phone-oshop tools I've tried! Kind of depressing to be told it's "incompatible" when in reality it's functional with some limitations.
Yeah... The thing is, the current UI isn't really good for small screens, so when we teamed up with Google to bring Krita to Android and ChromeOS, we only targeted large-screen devices.
We are trying to add a UX suitable for small-screen devices, but... Google changes Android so often and so weirdly that the guy working on Krita on Android pretty much spends all his time chasing those changes instead of designing a small-screen friendly UI.
I was actually looking into Krita the other day to see if it's possible for an iOS/iPad build to come out once side-loading is possible on those platforms. From what I can gather[0], it seems like there's already a working iPad build which is exciting. I'm hoping an alternative app store comes out as well to properly pay for it.
I feel like Krita is the next best thing after Photoshop, however; the interface really doesn't sit right with me at all. It feels very counter intuitive and I struggle finding what I need. I also don't like that "windows" inside the "main window" isn't really a thing unless you use the software(?) renderer, and even then it's sub-par at best. Like, I want to have 4 or 5 images open and see them all at the same time.
As a counterpoint, some years ago I felt it was time to use "a real painting program" and switch to Photoshop. It felt so backwards, mostly in terms of interface, that I dropped the idea very fast. There are a few shortcuts that I change or find missing in Krita, but apart from that it felt like the painting experience was much more streamlined (which is my main concern, so I can't talk for other aspects).
Adobe halted development of painting and illustration features in Photoshop a number of years ago. Their goal seems to be to get people to use Illustrator for illustrations and Fresco for painting.
I got into Krita a year or two ago and I've been thoroughly impressed. Kudos to the development team. I'm particularly happy with its wacom support; the radial menu is something I miss profoundly in Affinity. (I also love Affinity but for different reasons; and yes, there's a system-wide wacom radial menu under Windows, but it's not as good as Krita's.)
I once got a wacom-like tablet but I always wondered how does one learn to use it? And specially using software like Krita or MyPaint in Linux. I mean, supposing you can already draw with pen and paper. But I found it to be somewhat different, and I could never get used to. Maybe it's the lack of practice but also seeing almost no progress made me abandon. Any advice would be appreciated
Blind contour sketching. Doing a lot of this trains you to rely on tactility and learned motion instead of watching your hand or watching the cursor. As soon as I did that in the sketchbook for about two weeks daily and came back to the graphics tablet I was cruising through the drawing process.
If you have a paper/pencil practice, some of the fine motor training transfers. But you're right, not all of it! Particularly, the difference in surface friction used to throw me off.
Try starting with a piece of paper taped onto your tablet to reproduce a grabbier, more fricative surface.
Similarly, when working with good old fashioned graphite on paper, try smoother grades of paper, including "rite in the rain" style polymer-sheet paper. This will help you transfer the muscle memory in a stepwise fashion.
Open Office and Libre Office both have been suffering from this problem for years. They remain open source.
More than a decade ago I discussed this with RMS. His position is that these scammers are not a problem, rather they are helping to distribute FOSS software. And in fact, they do provide the source code when requested, I requested and got the code. So, as is usually the case, RMS is technically right even if it is difficult to see. I feel that reputational damage is significant, RMS feels that these scammers are not damaging the reputation of the FOSS software so long as they are not using any of the copyrighted components, such as the name.
It's a shame Paint.NET doesn't work in Wine. Gimp can do way too much, Krita is mostly for artists, and the various lightweight MS Paint alternatives lack things like layers. Paint.NET has fulfilled my requirements for quick image editing quite nicely during my Windows days.
However, I wouldn't call it a competitor to Krita. Krita is very much oriented at artists making digital art whereas Paint.NET is much more picture editing oriented.
Pinta served me well, but on modern distributions it's become unstable. I've resorted to GIMP and Photopea these days.
I'm jealous of the image editor built into SerenityOS (PixelPaint). It's getting awfully close to everything I want out of an image editor, but I'm not brave enough to try to port a Serenity application to Linux.
Try Pinta, it's pretty close to Paint.net in terms of functionality. But make sure to install it from the repository specified on the website. The version provided by various distributions is very old and unstable.
You know, I did try Pinta before Krita, and I can't remember what but I found it didn't support something I needed.
This is odd to me because I don't really do much other than need layers, a good text tool, and some effects like blur or similar. I might give it a try again, it's been at least a year since I last looked at it.
Yup. Finally switched last year to Krita from GIMP. Was a little awkward with the muscle memory for a bit, but damn, so much slicker. Reminds me of when I went to VSC from NPP and Atom.
Are any Krita devs here? I was very eager to replace PS with Krita, but I met a strong obstacle - it doesn't support PSD vectors (paths). This is catastrophic problem for me as 90% of my work contain paths. I was sure it was there, but when I brought my PSD I worked all night on to the linux user to make final tweaks, nothing worked. I was shocked. :( Are there plans to implement this?
> My Photoshop install from a previous life is a major reason I still keep a 15-year-old Mac running.
I've debated setting up an offline "creative corner" machine with a comfy older OS and Photoshop, something like Snow Leopard and Photoshop CS1/CS2, precisely because the core of what makes PS useful for me hasn't changed in ages. For my use case the new features added in versions since simply aren't worth the bloat and slowness that's come with them.
There are so many of us with this mindset, if there were usable tools that played well with muscle memory of oldschool adobe workflows the market for new versions of PS in particular and to a lesser extent Illustrator, would fall drastically.
It's weird seeing this on the top of the frontpage because of how old the app is.
It's great for annotating with symbols and circling stuff, and the "New from clipboard" function is awesome, but the text editor holds it back entirely. It's painful to do ANYTHING with text and they choose not to triage it.
There's a minimum text size, too, so it auto-goes back to that high text size unless you type a number in.
It's not ready for mainstream, I've sent this feedback as many others have.
I don't know if the text editor "holds it back entirely" to such an extent as to make it "not ready for mainstream", but definitely is a pain in the ass. I didn't even know adding text to an image could be made so complicated and buggy until I started using Krita.
If I read and understand that correctly, they aren't addressing the UX of the editor, but the engine's features instead? Features are nice, but I don't think people want to type their text in a big window before they see it on the canvas.
Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.NET, and even MS paint let you write text directly on the canvas with an insertion point. The Text tool in Krita is a whole level of abstraction away from being able to see what you want.
Yes, on-canvas editing of text is a project for this year, and probably most of next year. All in all we're spending tens of thousands of euros on the text shape and text tool, in the hope that now we're doing this for the fourth time, we can finally nail it.
The main purpose of Krita's text tool is comic book speech bubbles, though, not annotating screen shots.
I make comics and I am pretty sure that a feature set suitable for making word balloons is going to be very much a superset of what you need to annotate screenshots.
Annotation: pick a font/size/color and pick a place to start typing, or drag out a larger, rectangular text box and start typing.
Comics: also those text boxes might need to be ovals/rectangles/some absolutely crazy shape that fits the needs of the page, it's nice to automatically draw a balloon for them too, manage font/size/color across multiple text boxes on multiple pages, and then there's sound effects that start out as a cool font and get pushed around...
I may be biased by working in Illustrator, which has a very mature set of text tools. I hear that Clip/Manga Studio's text tools were barely functional for an embarassing number of years and there sure are a lot of comics people I know who love it despite that.
Clip Studio's text tools are really primitive, yes... And we're aware of the challenges. At least three people in the core team do make comics, too :-) And we want to support vertical text, RTL, ruby and all of that. But in this thread there's a link to a blog post that shows what already has been done, and there's been lots of work done since.
I see it mainly as an digital painting app and it is advertised by its creators as such ("painting program … art tools"). There, it goes far beyond basic functionality and is very much ready for mainstream.
It does a lot of things beyond that, and some people use it as general purpose tool but given that this is not part of the core purpose, it is not surprising that the mileage varies when it comes to text editing or color correction etc. (Still happy if they manage to improve their text tool!)
As a long-time user and supporter of Krita, I'm thrilled to see it mentioned here. However, I must express my concern about the choice of emphasizing "FREE" in all caps in this headline. While I understand that the cost-free nature of open-source software is certainly appealing, I feel that this particular framing could cheapen the overall value proposition of Krita.
Krita has much more to offer than just being free. It's a powerful and versatile painting program, developed by a dedicated team of professionals and volunteers who have worked tirelessly to make it an excellent tool for digital artists. The software offers a wide range of features, including an intuitive user interface, advanced brush engines, and robust layering capabilities. These strengths are what truly set Krita apart and should be the primary focus when promoting it.
By emphasizing the "FREE" aspect in all caps, the headline may inadvertently detract from these strengths and create the perception that Krita's most significant selling point is its price tag, rather than its outstanding functionality and features. I would suggest presenting Krita as a "professional open-source painting program" without the all-caps emphasis on "FREE," so that the conversation around it can focus more on its capabilities and the value it brings to the creative community.
Again, I wholeheartedly support Krita and am grateful for the fantastic work that has been put into it. I hope this critique is received in the caring and thoughtful spirit in which it was intended, as my goal is to ensure that Krita receives the recognition and appreciation it truly deserves.
There's lots of people in the world who can barely afford their computers, let alone the software to run on it.
Personally I launched my career from a self-education that made heavy use of pirated and open-source software. I would never have been able to buy software without that start.
It's a powerful and versatile painting program, developed by a dedicated team of professionals and volunteers who have worked tirelessly to make it an excellent tool for digital artists. The software offers a wide range of features, including an intuitive user interface, advanced brush engines, and robust layering capabilities. These strengths are what truly set Krita apart and should be the primary focus when promoting it.
This is table stakes for a paint program. Right now all versions of Manga Studio/Clip Studio are $25. Possibly more for the super deluxe version, I'm not sure if it's just currently also $25 or permanently $25. Procreate is $12. ArtRage is $5-80. All of these tools have an "intuitive user interface, advanced brush engines, and robust layering capabilities". All are developed by dedicated teams of pros who have been working to make them excellent tools for digital artists for many years.
Krita is available for free; Krita is partially built by volunteers. These are the only parts of the paragraph I quoted that do not apply to the other tools I cited. There's lots more tools in this space, too; I just listed a few things I see a lot of my pro artist friends using.
I think there's something going on with an upcoming subscription to updates for Clip on desktops, too? Some of my Clip-using friends were screaming about it a while back.
"“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis. "
This is entirely unrelated to Krita, but on the "free beer" mention: I had heard free as in beer, and also free as in puppies. But two that I heard recently and loved that make different points: Free as in mattress, and free as in piano.
Around me free pianos are just worth less than the cost to move them, not that there is anything wrong with them a professional couldn't tune.
I see people trying to sell old Yamaha organs and they lower the price until it becomes "free just take it out of here so I don't have to pay someone to do it."
Huh. Free as in mattress, I got the negative implication.
Free as in piano, thought it was some kind of… I dunno, almost a pun or something. In some places, people will play piano in public, performing for passers by, or just for their own entertainment.
“Free as in beer” has the implication of being probably a bait and switch or having some strings attached. “Free as in speech” has an implication of having some significant political statement; I mean, “free speech” covers trivial speech too of course, but it isn’t how we usually use the expression.
The idea of software more like a funny song that’s been released into the universe is a bit charming. I like my misinterpretation better than the real thing, I think.
Free as in piano... I read that as "ok, you got a free piano, but now you've got to invest a lot of time into learning how to play it". Free as in free book, if you will.
See also the "everything must be paid for twice" article (submitted a while back on HN).
I don't get how those help saying what value open source software does or does not give. With the original two there are clearly two ways to view free (beer, as in you do not pay for the software, and speech as in that you get certain rights with it).
You are talking about the quality of the software, and I don't think that is correlated to either the versions of free described above. I have paid for software that has been buginfested and that has been completely unfit for its purpose.
Is any of what you said related to free/libre software?
For me it has become a reflex to check, when a product says it is "free", whether they mean no-cost or freedom. Always a little disappointed, when they chose the wording without seemingly knowing about libre.
We have the same situation at work. We have a couple of fantastic "free" data products that should have a price tag of hundreds of dollars.
I personally mention "Open access enterprise ready data" but it doesn't have the same "oomph" as saying it is free. The product is shared under CC-BY-SA and we geniunely treat it as an enterprise level product with no compromise. But yeah the keyword "free" does dilute the percieved quality of the product.
> the choice of emphasizing "FREE" in all caps in this headline.
You’re welcome to fork it and try to sell it if you think that’s such a great idea.
Anyway are you going to blame the user? I will. It sucks people pay for a $3 coffee or a cigs or chips not software they use for even 10s. Maybe figure out a way to make software physiologically addictive like coffee tobacco and junk food, and you can bypass the two decades of cultural programming of 4b people to value intangibles at 0.
> You’re welcome to fork it and try to sell it if you think that’s such a great idea.
Emphasis mine. Are you implying the OP shouldn't raise these ideas? Have you ever had a complaint about a user interface in your car? You are, after all, free to build your own and design it how you like. They saw something they thought could be improved, provided a rational explanation of why they think a change should at least be considered, and did so in a manner that's very respectful of both the software and the people who developed it. So this comment feels more than a little...reductive to me. Moreover, I don't read their commentary as suggesting the software shouldn't be free, merely that its price tag shouldn't be the loudest and most prominent selling point. It's a well-known psychological phenomenon that people want things they think are valuable, so putting a $5 sign on the furniture you're trying to give away makes it more likely to go.
Although, I don’t see “FREE” all that often (other than this case). I see “Free” more often, which I take as making the free as in liberated, not free as in zero cost distinction.
They're quite different. Krita is more about digital painting and GIMP is more about photo processing. If you're familiar with CSP and Photoshop, Krita is more like CSP and GIMP is more like Photoshop.
Specifically, Krita has a much more sophisticated brush engine.
Even for light photo editing and making memes and such, I much prefer Krita over Gimp. I find the interface more straightforward to use. (And in terms of features I prefer Photopea over both, but unfortunately it's not free software.)
The worst thing about AI becoming common is people accusing each other of having used AI to generate their work for them, when it probably isn't the case.
Even though I don't deny there's clearly a tradition of depicting feminine characters at various levels of sexualisation, c'mon, this mascot is in full-body armour/exoskeleton and a dress over it (or maybe it's an android in a dress)!
Look, this child mermaid on the Photoshop splash screen[1] has no clothes beneath the waist. Is it NSFW too?
If your workplace has a rule against cutesy mascots, you can use --no-splash to disable the splash screen on all platforms.
I'm not sure what place of work would consider this mascot to be NSFW (maybe a theocratic country where women are forced to hide their bodies for religious reasons?) but the switch doesn't prevent mascot from popping up elsewhere, so if you are in such a place you should probably avoid this program all together (or find a better employer).
There doesn’t have to be a rule against cutesy mascots for the Krita splash to be just a little bit weird. I don’t have pictures of any women not in my family, especially young girls, on my desk, and people around me would consider it weird if I did, and I would consider it a little weird if they did. True, the switch doesn’t prevent female anime mascots from popping up elsewhere, yet somehow that’s not a problem I’ve ever had, is it common for you?
* edit I don’t know or understand why this is being downvoted, but to make the point slightly more clearly, Krita’s splash screens are only slightly unprofessional, and they are are slightly unprofessional for exactly the same reason that using the Lena image in computer vision is now considered slightly unprofessional. People are free to disagree, but it’s a fact that some people don’t love it, and that’s all that’s needed to make it “semi” inappropriate for work. It’s nothing obscene, nothing in your face, it’s just slightly suggestive in a way that not everyone wants at work.
"a little bit weird" is a pretty low bar to cross. Enough to maybe go "huh okay", but nowhere close to NSFW. Your average news site carries ads more NSFW than this and most people still browse the web without ad blockers.
Why would the gender of the mascot even matter? Would it be better if the mascot was male?
Depends entirely on your definition of “safe”. And yes my very point was that a little bit weird is a low bar to cross, and yet it’s still crossing a bar. That is exactly why the parent said “semi” NSFW. I don’t browse news sites at work for the same reason. Hey if you want your boss and co-workers to see you with “huh okay” stuff on your screen, and have no concern you might slowly lose on promotions or get HR complaints, then knock yourself out. Speaking only personally, I don’t want anyone in my office to feel uncomfortable with what’s on my screen or desk.
The gender doesn’t matter. It would be just as weird if it was an ambiguously young looking male child/teenager with emphasized anatomy under tight clothing. I would definitely also avoid having that on my monitor or desk.
That’s a straw man. The Krita picture of “Kiki” is not a member of my family, or anyone else’s. Nobody in my family is ambiguously young with melon sized breasts, and even if they were I definitely wouldn’t have a picture of it on my desk.
Your verbiage makes it sound concerning, but if it's the following image[0] then I don't see how anyone could misconstrue it with lolita culture. It looks like something you'd see in a Studio Ghibli film.
The visible garters aren’t a clue? Yes the visual style might be similar to Ghibli, in the sense that it’s anime, but see if you can find a shot from any of their films with garters under a skirt. That’s only one of the Krita splash screens. If you look at all of them, the suggestiveness is relatively consistent though not exactly the same from version to version.
Speaking only personally, I can imagine how this image would make some people slightly squeamish if I had it on display at work. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have it on your desktop. You do you. I’m only saying I wouldn’t do it, and not necessarily for obvious or extreme reasons, it’s really just for subtle reasons, but personally I don’t see how anyone could not see the slightly suggestive nature of Krita’s splash screens. Which is fine at home, just not at work (for me).
Cool. I don’t hang those on my office wall either. It’s not a competition for which one’s worse. There are images that aren’t in any danger of bothering coworkers, and images that aren’t appropriate in all settings. Both of the Kikis here land in the second category when it comes to professional workplaces, unless maybe you’re an animator.
As far as Kiki’s Delivery Service goes, Googling it, people online tend to point out that the shots are of bloomers, not panties per-se. It’s not a sexualized symbol like garters are. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0097814/parentalguide/nudity
In most western cultures, visible garters are lingerie not appropriate to a professional environment for anyone who isn't a sex worker/stripper/fashion model.
I didn’t call it unambiguously NSFW. The top comment (not mine) didn’t either, they used the qualifier “semi”. This obviously isn’t porn, it’s art. The famous Lena image has no breasts at all, and it’s considered semi NSFW. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna “it is no longer considered appropriate by some authors” … “Suggestive pictures used in lectures on image processing ... convey the message that the lecturer caters to the males only.”
You don’t have to be in a puritanical setting for some women and men around you to be uncomfortable with your pin-ups, regardless of which body parts are visible. They might never even say anything about it, and yet it can still be slightly inappropriate and/or unprofessional.
Thankfully the cartoon images don't share problematic aspects in common, such as coming from an old playboy shoot. They're not even suggestive of that.
Unfortunately some people still don’t care for these particular cartoon images for whatever reason as evidenced by multiple requests to disable the splash screen, here and elsewhere on the internet. If you believe strongly that these images are neutral and appropriate for work, by all means, show them!
Heh. If any of the official Kiki images has a Kiki with melon-sized boobs, _I_ would have melon-sized boobs, and I've only been on HRT for a year and a half, and am an A-cup. (Aspiring to a B-cup, though!)
I guess using the word melon seems to have triggered some people, and is arguable given the cartoony proportions, but the links I put above are definitely adult boobs, and larger than B cup, relative to the torso/shoulders/arms. The boob size isn’t really the point, the subject matter as a whole just isn’t workplace material, right? I don’t quite understand all the pushback on the idea that these pictures aren’t completely neutral and aren’t 100% appropriate for the workplace.
I think I see your point and agree to certain extent; it is not about the breast size. Even if you see the splash screen from a distance where you can't specifically focus on the body parts, the image itself is reminiscent of typical explicit anime/manga involving young girls (even if there isn't anything particularly NSFW about the image itself). So yes, the potential/implicit connotations can certainly make someone and their co-workers uncomfortable.
Why are the comments getting more flippant, more incredulous, and more unreasonable despite there being lots of discussion already explaining the nuanced and fairly uncontroversial point of view that squirrel girl isn’t the single most appropriate image for a workplace? I’m not alone, and this isn’t the first conversation about Krita’s splash screens being mildly unprofessional. Nobody here is claiming the pictures are generally inappropriate, only that they’re not neutral in the workplace. I don’t mind the art. My kids have similar art. I still wouldn’t hang it on my office wall. If you want to, you should, and see if everyone at your work likes it. I was only trying to add explanation and specificity to my comment precisely because of comments like yours pretending incredulously that there’s absolutely nothing to discuss, and attacking me with ad-hominems.
This is not even a prude thing, based on further replies on this thread, I actually find it disturbing how they can take the most innocent of images and find it sexually suggestive. The only requirement to trigger "semi-nsfw" seems to be that the character is female. If this is prudishness, it's the sort of prudishness that's caricatured as coming from repressed perversion of some sort.
NSFW doesn't have only to do with sex or crudity. Unless you are in an animation shop, the splash screen screams "not serious" to anyone not in that scene. My kids draw anime. A boss might go, "Why are you using a toy for real work? Do you need Adobe suite?"
There’s some basic level of professionalism I expect at work. I wouldn’t set an attractive woman as my screensaver or desktop, regardless of the number of layers of clothing involved.
That’s 100% straw man. The issue isn’t the anime cultural reference, the issue is that the splash screens are a slightly suggestive picture of a female child/teenager who’s not in my family, which is creepy for adult males to have on display at work regardless of which country you live in.
I usually don't go into these kind on discussions, especially on HN, but allow me to mention that in many countries, nobody would think much of such splash screen even at work. And that doesn't mean in any way that the person in question is creepy or that anyone else around would think so for a minute. If this artwork would trigger a reaction, this wouldn't go further than "hey, nice drawing" without any afterthoughts.
Seeing this picture as suggestive is immensely conditioned by the personal and cultural background of the beholder and his community. These norms aren't universal.
Which countries are you thinking of? This used to be more acceptable in the US, but norms are changing, and they are changing globally. There are still some places in the US where nobody would care, but these places are becoming less frequent over time. And I’d agree that the images do not automatically make someone creepy, but I would say that it might automatically make someone insensitive to those around them, maybe women in particular in this case. This may be true regardless of the past culture of acceptance of such imagery.
Your position is extreme. And by definition one of a minority. If you've got the feeling it's growing, it's called radicalisation, which is a concern for the fate of societies since it's defeating all the efforts that have been made for getting out of some dark ages of the past.
It triggered a lot of reactions from other HNers since such a world view is denying the basic freedoms to express of the opposite gender, and even the freedom to exist.
You seem to have an education, use it to widen your perspective of the world.
Whoa that went off the rails fast. If that’s what you think then I’m certain you have completely misunderstood my position, and I’m not explaining it well.
I was referring to the global closing of the gender gap, for example, which is occurring due to changing norms. You can read about it.
Why do you think I’m in a minority? What makes you think people here or elsewhere disagree with the idea that some images aren’t entirely appropriate in the workplace? I haven’t said anything that’s even remotely controversial. In the US the law agrees and corporations agree and we all are subjected to anti-harassment tracing every year just to remind us, even while some people reminisce about the good old days when pinups at work were acceptable.
We are talking strictly about the workplace in this thread, not about the freedom to express yourself in your personal life. It seems like you might have missed the premise here and are jumping to wildly mistaken conclusions.
That's the one that comes up on the splash screen for me, and if you see that as in any way "suggestive", that's disturbing to me.
Would you have the same problem if they had Mickey Mouse in their splash screen? After all, he is topless and arguably more suggestive than Kiki is in any way.
No that one’s on the less suggestive side of the various Krita splash screens. (Still not something I would want to hang a poster of at work.) Do a Google image search for “Krita splash screen” and look at the broader set. These are more suggestive than the one in your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35773999https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35773357
I’m not going to touch the Mickey comment, that’s weird.
That one just seems unprofessional in so much as it is child-like. There is another where she is visibly wearing garters, which is not child-like for the past more than a century.
Anime fandom, at least among online westerners, seems to primarily sexualize the cartoons. People who are aware of this may not want to have it displayed in a professional setting.
"It appropriates something from my culture that is sexualized and associates it with child-like qualities which are taboo to be sexualized, which makes it seem pedo-creepy". There, fixed that for you. In western cultures generally, garters are lingerie, and not professional if you aren't a sex worker or lingerie model (or ok, maybe a rock star).
That anime character? That's gotta be some extreme prudity where you live to be NSFW. Let me guess, America? Shield your eyes from the Waifu tiddies my child!
I remember the early to mid '90s's when it was still acceptable to have half naked women on PC screen savers, wallpapers or calendars on the walls in the office (Europe). IIRC some German hardware suppliers still gifted us wall calendars with women in bikinis in 2018.
The post's author made a factual statement relevant to many people who might consider using the software in an office environment. It should not have been downvoted, or flagged. It would have been useful to include information on how to suppress the splash screen though.
Vouching never seems to work for me. I used to use it when I thought a comment had been unfairly flagged even when I disagreed with it (as in this case), and I suspect I've had my vouching ability shadow-disabled for diverging from the mean.
Regular downvoting is bad enough, but flagging is effectively an unassailable super-downvote.
FWIW, I don’t suspect my vouching is disabled. The comment has been un-flagged now. The churn in this thread is fairly interesting though. I can honestly see why it might be enough of a debate trigger that it’s best from a moderation point of view if the thread was harder to find and comment on.
Digital painting was a skill to learn on my bucket list. Emphasis on "was". Within the last 6 months all of that has changed. I no longer value digital painting as a skill.
It's easy to see why based on everything's that happened in the news. I'm sure a lot of people share my sentiment.
If you seriously take that attitude then it's hardly worth learning to do anything - there will always be someone or some computer who is better at it, so why even try?
You can still do digital painting while you are in a plane or taking a trip, just because AI advances in this space has made a lot of strides doesn't mean you necessarily have to give up on doing something.
hallarempt, thanks for making that clear - I have no issue with the project in that case. Also thanks a lot for maintaining Krita, I've used the software in the past and it's been great. I'm especially interested in combining Stable Diffusion with Krita.
Hard to see how this comment isn't engaging in whataboutism. Original poster is from Ukraine, a country that is, at present, actively being invaded by Russia, not from Middle East or Africa.
The difference is the US still largely abides by and enforces human rights. Major powers will always do crappy stuff, I think, but there is a difference in degree.
Genuine and serious praise for not insisting on sticking with an absurdly embarassing and arguably problematic name that would be likely to hamper adoption for quite some time, unlike a certain other free and open source painting program.
I guess both are meant to be a kind of joke, calling your software a bad name in jest. But I think the joke works much better in the case of "git". Depending on what you read into it, calling someone a "gimp" is really quite offensive.
git: A silly, incompetent, stupid or annoying person (usually a man).
gimp: A person who is lame due to a crippling of the legs or feet.
Sure, but let me be clear, I don't think that matters at all.
Again, I'm pretty sure the reason I always get downvoted to hell on this one is because people think I'm being "the thought police" or something. And I suppose it's kind of like that but not really?
Yes, personally, I do argue slightly against the name, but honestly, I lose no sleep on it on a personal level.
What bothers me the most is that GIMP feels like a huge missed opportunity. As in -- let's say for sake of argument that the creators are strongly attached to the name, I don't know, even if it was named after Richard S. Gimp and you wanted to honor him, so you have a theoretically "bulletproof" reason.
On balance, it still AINT WORTH IT. You guys had a SERIOUS shot of eating Adobe's lunch and strongly spreading a much better way to do picture editing, but you screwed it up by staying inside your own bubble. The name was just NOT WORTH KEEPING.
Does GIMP have a bigger market share in non-English speaking places? Because if it does, then maybe the name is to be blamed. But if usage is similar everywhere, the name does not seem to matter much, or at all, for the (lack of) success.
I don't think this is a useful metric; the problem with how tech scales is that multiplicative effects are hard to measure.
But as someone who works in IT between tech folk and regular folk, I immediately percieve that a great number of liminal regular folk are going to 100% nope out of a terrible name like this. Might as well call it Poopy Edit or something like that.
So when people do not understand the meaning of a word and not care about it, because they do not speak that language, the metric is useless instead of a test of "everything else but the name".
My, small but non zero, experience says the reason these speakers of other language declined to use it was because it lacked features and sometimes because "piracy is also free". They pointed the brush system was basic, PS already had effects they used a lot. No adjustment layers, styles or layer groups to be more efficient. Slow processing because it operated in full data always, while PS solved preview first and the rest in background. And many other things. The Mac ones found no issues with the windowing system (no MDI mode then, with everything wrapped by big window), because it matched more what they were used to, but Windows users found it bad because their OS is not designed for it. None cared about what Gimp or Wilber words are, it was "a poor PS clone with a croissant dog mascot".
I am an artist who is quite happy for part of her living to be "drawing porn" and I find "The GIMP", considered solely as a word for "a weird fetish thing", to be a singularly tacky name.
The Web is an imperfect corpus, but "git" is less commonly used as an insult. Even once you git rid of all the software references with "git -software -version -torvalds -branch -commit -github -repo -repository" your primary definitions are as a synonym for "get," e.g., the top result is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git!
Compare to "gimp -image -org" where the top result is not only an insult, but an ableist one that would instantly land you a trip to HR.
GIMP's name is great. Had it chosen any other, it would not have stuck in my mind for almost twenty years. The "Ummm akshyually GIMP is an evil slur" crowd is the same as the "Blacklist LITERALLY murders blacks with racism" crowd, so I see very little reason to take it seriously.
Again, wrong -- I'm addressing a different crowd here. As a black person, I'm mostly with you on e.g. blacklist.
I'm thinking about "people in the middle who might pick this up." It's not that it's offensive and hurtful and protecting feelings and whatnot and that's the primary problem.
It's that "possibly offensive" here equates to "incredibly unprofessional."
GIMP is professional quality software and a LOT OF PEOPLE WONT BELIEVE THAT owing to the name. A decent analogy is if it were called Poopy Edit or something like that.
Off the top of my head: the word "gimped" is similar in meaning to "handicapped", and if someone "is a gimp", then that could be considered similar to saying someone "is a cripple". Although I have no clue what any of that has to do with Krita.
Back in 2019 they mentioned that "Krita has gone from 2 to 4 full-time developers over the last 10 months, and Steam has been instrumental in raising the funds to make that possible" https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...
I wish more project would do the same. I know the stores take a cut but my guess would be that it's easier to make people buy there than make them a direct donation for example.