PSA for Linux users: Use the official Krita AppImage!

Tech Support General Questions
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TL;DR

I don’t think this advice is called out loudly enough currently: the unofficial, community-maintained packages of Krita (flatpak, snap, deb, whatever) definitely have bugs not present in the official AppImage. Use the official AppImage! (And for dead-simple AppImage management, including desktop integration, I recommend GearLever. I discovered it recently and it’s great.)

If anyone needs help migrating their configs, e.g., from a flatpak install, let me know and I can write up a guide. It was pretty straightforward!

The rest of the story

I’ve been using the Krita flatpak for months, since I started with Krita. I rarely have issues with “community maintained” packages in general – in fact, in Linux, community-maintained packages tend to be the norm. So I didn’t think twice about that. And flatpak has better integration w/ my distro (PopOS). Easy to just click “install” from my desktop, it updates automatically, etc.

However, I remember at some point reading a warning from @Deevad about the non-AppImage versions. But I was lazy, didn’t want to figure out migrating my config files to the new location, and so on.

Don’t be like me! :sweat_smile:

I experienced a bunch of random little UI bugs: issues with opening files when a Krita window was already open, issues with cropping canvases, and even some weird behavior with certain brushes. I just wrote it off: “well, it’s bound to be rough around the edges”, etc. Linux users have a high tolerance for such things…

I was also surprised to see updates rolling in way more frequently than actual Krita updates were happening. Seems that these were packaging fixes, not fixes for Krita itself.

…and then I finally tried to the AppImage. So far, none of my previously-noticed bugs have occurred.

By the way, I have no beef whatsoever with the folks who create and maintain these community packages – I think the issue is just that Krita is incredibly complex to package, because it’s an incredibly complex piece of software! I’m glad these folks are working so hard to extend Krita’s reach.

Anyway, at the very least: if you notice a bug when using one of these versions, try the official release before reporting it! (And if it is indeed a packaging bug, be a good citizen and report that to the relevant packager :slightly_smiling_face:)

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I’m curious to know more about these papercut issues. Can you post a screenshot of flatpak vs appiamge you’ve been experiencing?

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D’oh… I just uninstalled the flatpak and deleted that version of the config :sweat_smile:

I should have taken some screenshots. I can reinstall it later and do that.

For now, here are descriptions of a few of the biggest issues I’ve run into with the flatpak which have (so far!) not occurred with the appimage:

  1. Cropping. When cropping an image, artifacts will sometimes appear in the resulting image. Most common this presents as white garbage around the edges, but sometimes I’ll get big ugly artifacts in the middle of the image as well. One guaranteed way to get this to happen was to: crop, then undo, then re-do. The artifacts weren’t just superficial either – when I “export” the image (to a png or whatever), the artifacts were present in the exported image as well. (I always saved before cropping for this reason, since restoring from a previous save was the only way I felt comfortable to “fix” this.)
  2. Opening a new file from the file manager. When Krita is already open, opening another kra file from the file manager. Normally this simply opens the new file in a new tab of the existing window. But around half the time, this would attempt to open a new Krita window, which would simply hang indefinitely. After several minutes, an error dialog would appear. (EDIT: I see this has been a known issue for years now…)
  3. Textured brushes. Sometimes textured brushes simply stopped working. The brushes themselves worked, but their texture would simply not appear. No amount of toggling brush options or changing things in that current Krita instance would fix this. Restarting Krita fixed it every time.

Those are the most egregious issues, but there may have been other smaller nits that I didn’t note down.

I know other folks have experienced issues as well. (Aside from the issues Deevad has mentioned in the past.) For example, I came across this thread recently when looking into these issues.

You can get some idea of past and present issues by looking at the issue list of the flatpak github page.