I recently made the switch to an appimage build instead of the kritalime repo, because I’m too impatient to wait for kritalime to build for the newer Krita releases. One thing that bugs me though, is the UI difference, here’s an example with both open:
The right window is the kritalime Krita, and the UI I prefer. It’s using the system theming or widgets or something, and overall looks way more polished. Is there any way for me to get the best of both worlds? The always up to date Appimages from Krita’s website, but the nice Ui from the kritalime repo?
No, that’s not possible. That needs the KDE Plasma or GTK Qt platform plugin. The apimage comes with its own version of Qt 5.12, with a lot of patches to make things work. Distributions have a different version of Qt, so Krita cannot load the plugins the distribution ships, and we cannot ship the platform plugin because those need way more dependencies than we are prepared to build.
Is there an up to date location where I can get Krita with all my previous configuration and the system UI?
I’ve tried Flatpak and Snap, and they both seem to be sandboxed/without my previous configuration and custom brushes.
Is there a reason kritalime is behind right now, at least for Ubuntu/Kubuntu 20.10?
The Krita Lime maintainer hasn’t managed to update it yet, and we haven’t managed to be in contact for some time. So, no, you’ll have to make do with the distro packages (if you run Neon or add kubuntu’s ppa, you will get the latest version, but it will be buggy because Qt 5.15 is broken and unpatched), and if you run snap or flatpak, you will have a broken Qt, and no system integration – so unless you build Krita yourself, you will have to make do with the appimage.
The appimage at least uses the same config and resources location as a version of Krita installed from a repo.
How hard would it be to build Krita from source? Otherwise, what would I need to do to add the KDE Neon or Kubuntu repo for the newest Krita version? (I really like the system integration from installing from a repo, being able to have previews in Dolphin, right clicking Krita to open a recent file, etc.)
Edit: I also contacted someone (and I believe they are head of the Krita lime repo) by finding their email on launchpad, and they replied quite quickly and said they’d update the packages for the Krita lime repo (specifically groovy, since that’s what I run and asked for) in the near future, hopefully that’s true!
