Hi guys, hope you’re having a good day.
I’m in the process of completely removing Windows 10 from my PC, switching to Debian 12 KDE Plasma.
I know this might be a noob question but, after all the time I spent customizing Krita, finding the right brushes and everything else, could someone please tell me if making a full backup would be possible? If so, how?
(I’ve also been thinking about doing pretty much the same thing to my old Samsung Galaxy Tab S3, so I guess the question would be the same)
TIA
If you can, install Debian on a completely fresh disk (may be a good idea if you used your old one for a few years), so that you can mount your old Windows drive in Linux and copy files as needed. Once you can work for a few weeks without missing anything critical, you can then nuke your old drive.
Krita stores various config files in User folder in AppData Local and Roaming. You would need to copy the config and resource files from there. I’m not sure, but I believe they are largely platform-independent.
For your brushes and the other resources needed for painting, so brush tips, gradients, color palettes, you simply need to copy your full resource folder.
This folder can be found via various ways. The simplest thing for unexperienced users is Krita’s menu ‘‘Settings’’ >> ‘‘Manage Resources…’’ and click on the button Open Resource Folder¹.
You can also find it if you follow the path Krita shows via ‘‘Settings’’ >> ‘‘Configure Krita’’ >> ‘‘General’’ in the tab ‘‘Resources’’.
Of course, you can simply open it via your file manager, just enter %APPDATA%\krita\ into the Explorer address bar and hit enter, and it will open your Krita’s resource folder.
No matter which way you’ve used to get into the folder, just go up one level, so leave the folder krita you are currently in, and copy the whole over to your new OS.
Now to your settings, there are two files you may want to migrate over to your new OS, the kritarc and the kritashortcutsrc. Both are found in the same location, but you have to adapt your kritarc to the new OS, the kritashortcutsrc needs no extra work just copy it to the new OS.
Now to Krita’s main settings file kritarc, you can adapt it to your new OS by exchanging some paths in it with the paths your new OS uses, but this can lead to errors if you make mistakes. On the other hand, it is not a miracle, and if you take your current kritarc and open it using an editor like Notepad++, kate, PSpad, or if you have nothing better Windows Notepad, and study its internals, you should be able to determine where you have to adapt what.
A funny thing, you may notice, will be that the notation of Windows paths in the kritarc, because they are following the Linux route and use slashes instead of the for Windows common backslashes.
To find your kritarc just enter %LOCALAPPDATA% into your file manager’s address bar and hit enter and then scroll down to the very end of that folder, there you will find the kritarc among a few other files Krita uses, but you only need the kritarc if you want to take it with you to the new OS.
The other Krita files found together with the kritarc are not meant to be transferred over to a new installation, Krita will recreate them from scratch with the parameters needed for your new OS.
Michelist
¹ Because another user, not long ago, meant to search the resource folder via ‘‘Settings’’ >> ‘‘Manage Resource Libraries…’’, NO THAT’S WRONG, you reach it via ‘‘Manage Resources…’’
I moved from windows to linux last year and beside copying the appData folders,
- I made bundles of all of my customized brushes
- I exported keyboard shortcuts and work spaces
- and I also made screenshots of all of my settings
I don’t think you have to do all of this, but I could sleep better after this. 
@Michelist You posted while I was thinking
This could have helped me a lot back than 
This is a forum, you just should have asked back then. 
But I once tested a migration from Windows to Linux, simply because I wanted to know if that is possible, and you can adapt the kritarc, that is absolutely possible but needs the will to do it. Only ever make changes to a backup copy of that file, so if anything goes wrong, you can take the next backup copy for the next try.
Michelist
That was before I joined the forum.
Thanks for the tip! 
Bravo, welcome to the Linux world. Choosing a distro with KDE plasma is the route to go, as far as I am concerned. I was a Debian user for a long time, but, I discovered that Deb 12 does not run the official Krita appimage on my HP laptop. It also has problems working with my Wacom Cintiq 16 tablet, regardless of the hardware, be it a desktop or a laptop.
openSuze, either Leap or Tumbleweed are good, I am using MX Linux on this HP desktop with no problems whatever. All of these distros come with Plasma built in.
I agree with @YRH about using a fresh disk to install Linux. Disconnect the Windows disk to ensure the boot loader goes on the Linux disk, then add the Windows later. You can then format that disk and use it to hold copies of all your art as backups.
Hope this helps
To be fair, the distros I was most interested in were Ubuntu Studio, Fedora Design, and maybe Pop!_OS, but the more I researched the more I shifted to Debian 12.
I found this guide I’m following and a blog post from a Krita dev using it on Debian 12 (can’t find the link again though, sorry).
Still, thank you for the suggestion. I’ll definitely try it out in case Debian would start giving me problems.
I agree with @YRH about using a fresh disk to install Linux.
I should have been more specific, my bad. I’m actually on a laptop with both SSD and HDD, but I guess it’s not the same thing.
Thank you so much, this is very detailed and easy to understand.
I’ll try my best to edit the kritarc file but I guess it would also be a good idea to do what @del did, in case I’d be unable to edit it correctly. Just in case I’ll make screenshots of all the settings as a plan B.
As someone who uses debian 12 GNOME, I can say that most likely, if you happen to run into trouble, would be hardware/driver support given how debian uses a LTS kernel. The gap between distros has been reduced significantly with appimages and flatpak emerging the past number of years.
Thank you for the heads up. Always good to know what I’d have to take a look at first.