25 years of Krita – OSnews

Twenty-five years. A quarter of a century. We’ve been working on Krita for so long. Well, what will become Krita. It started as KImageShop, but the name was changed by a long-dead German lawyer. It was then renamed Krayon and that name was also dropped. Then the name was changed to Krita and that name stuck.

I only became part of Krita in 2003, when Krita was still part of the KDE suite of productivity applications, KOffice, later renamed Calligra… And I became the maintainer of Krita in 2004, when Patrick Julien passed the baton. This means that I have been with Krita for about twenty of those twenty-five years, so I hope, dear reader, that you will forgive me for writing this truly personal post; a very large part of my life was connected with Krita and it will show.

↫ Krita website

While it may not be as popular as LibreOffice due to fewer people needing it, Krita is a staple of Linux desktop applications (it’s also available for Windows and macOS) and I honestly can barely believe it’s been around this long. I’m as far from being an art painter as a squirrel’s tail is from a working propeller engine, so I don’t need Krita, but I’m always surprised how many people mention using it for their painting efforts.

I wish the project and its creators another successful 25 years, because they’re going to need it – Krita 5.3 is coming soon (I think), and the much more involved Krita 6.0, which allows the jump from Qt 5 to Qt 6, is also in the works. Privately, I know the main maintainer of Krita online and, as she mentioned at the end of the article, the pandemic has hit her hard and maintaining such a huge open source project is not easy at the beginning. Much respect for continuing this project and of course to all the other people who contributed to this project.