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Lots to be excited about in this release, particularly with animation. I've been using Krita as a daily driver for a while. It's been slowly working through its list of features that are "technically there" but that are either very narrow or just kind of cumbersome to use, and broadening them out and making them more competitive. That effort really shows. So in this release the animation tools go from being mostly suited for basic frame-by-frame animation to now having storyboards, and being able to do tweening, cloned frames, and having a bit nicer UX; it's a big jump forward. I say this whenever Krita comes up on HN, but I see a huge amount of potential in this project because of how its development team approaches development; they pay a lot of attention to the artist community and they're not just developing features in isolation, it feels like they have a sense of direction about the project, they put a ton of effort into UX. Krita has gone from technically sort-of usable as a daily driver, to basically good enough to be a daily driver, to actually just feeling quite nice to paint in where you'd probably have it installed on the side even if you were already accustomed to other programs and even if you didn't care about the OS aspect at all. The closest comparison-project I can think of is Blender, and I mean that as a high complement. If you're coming out of the Clip Studio world, it's worth taking a look at. There are some features I miss, particularly around the vector tools and being able to redraw line widths, but there's also some stuff that Krita just does better now: I think it has a much cleaner interface than Clip Studio and is just overall more pleasant to use with touchscreen devices. It's linked in the release notes, but dropping a second link to their funding page (https://fund.krita.org/). If you want to have a competitive Open Source drawing/painting tool on Linux that can rival some of the more traditional painting tools in the same vein as projects like Blender, then I think Krita is pretty much the singular best project to back/fund. It's already good enough to use as a serious tool, and more than that I just feel very optimistic about their entire development process and trajectory. This is a good project for the OS community to just throw resources/money at. |