The artist-programmer barrier and krita

Wrong assumption, It is a developers and users chat and not a dev only chat. Unlike other projects we have resisted the urge to separate the chat into dev and user chatrooms. Atleast I remember when some other person suggested it I was vehemently opposed to it. So that is your wrong assumption.

Again you are assuming. Some of the devs are coding for Krita since long long time. How can you say you are using Krita more than they spent time of coding it since there are devs who have worked on krita since before it became anything production ready. The maintainer has worked on it since it was just a front end to imagemagick a command line utility.

And here you are saying your voice is next to nothing has anyone from the team specifically said this? Or is this just your assumption. Even if it is an assumption do you suggest that there should be a person who will listen to user demand and start working on it right away? Do you know any proprietary or Free software project that does this?

Krita developers have open and public chatroom, open and public forum, and open and public mailing list, there are meeting held on each Monday again open and public. If these are not opportunities to voice your concerns I do not know what we need more.

Now if your complaint is that devs should listen to a new user coming to chat and suggesting or giving advice on first day of joining about the direction of the project then I believe you yourself know that it is not right. After all there is a maintainer to the Krita project to do that.

Here let me give you my own example, I was a new krita user in 2014, I switched from windows to linux, it was new for me. But I stuck to the chat and I started contributing, wherever I can, I began to respond to user queries, started being in the community, I asked questions in the chatroom, I got answers for them however foolish they might be. I even have bug reports which date back to 2014 or 2018. I do not feel neglected. I know this is how Free software works. My voice is not neglected too, developers do listen to my complaints. Not just in Krita this is true for other KDE projects. Recently I am testing graphic tablet settings panel under wayland (linux display protocol), I had made the bug report about it here even if it is irritating for me (you can check my post history and rant about wayland) I make my point and leave the dev to take it or leave it. It is slow but it is heard and acted upon. I am not a developer by the way.

So I believe you can join in the team too, it will take time but you will need patience. If more people need certain things it will surely get implemented. Yes I won’t get what I specifically want implemented that would be very presumptuous of me to expect special treatment to my request. After all it is the developers who code not me.

P.S. There are two or three examples given here in this thread of developers listening to user requests if it is possible to implement quickly. you yourself say that @dkazakov and @tiar helped you, I don’t understand then how your voice is not heard. Do you need more developers listening to you?

Well, for voting, you could categorise the requests so that there are requests distributed across the app, let’s arbitrarily say 3 for painting, 1 for animation, 1 for vector.

Other than straight up voting, majority decides, you could do voting + rating.

So for example, you’ll have a list of features to vote on:

1. Feature A
2. Feature B
3. Feature C

I like feature A, so I upvote it. But, to me it’s not critically important, so I rate it 4/10.
I don’t like feature B, so won’t vote for it. And for feature C, I upvote it and rate it 9/10.
That way, if you get lot’s of high ratings, it may be prioritised over one with many votes and a low rating.


Communication
I do think it’s good to minimise overhead for the devs on communication. But a roadmap every now and then and overview of what has been accomplished since the last roadmap would be sufficient for me. I think that’s much easier than hunting through the feedback soliciting topics here on Krita-artists.

As for chats and discord, they are not indexed by search engines, so I think it would be a shame if good ideas end up getting lost there. I personally prefer an open platform for communication.

Workflow polish
I do think it’s good to have an ‘over the shoulder’ meeting between devs and users. This could be as easy as submit a video of what you are doing and where you are hitting a wall. For that to work, I think it would be great to have an equivalent of Screen Cast Keys like Blender has.


This would show what the user does in terms of inputs and which functions they invoke (since the user may remap lots of buttons).

@raghukamath would it be possible to create a Workflow polish category on the forums? And instead of just liking, does Discourse support different emoji responses like Discord does? In that case, there could be a giant topic with rules in the opening post (including a copy-paste template for submissions). Users can then post their issues in this topic.

In another topic, devs could list the submissions they think are doable. And users would be able to ‘like’ a post with numbers ranging from 1-10 (if discourse allows). Otherwise, this could be done in a Discord server too. With Discord, you can at least have a channel for each voting round. But again, it is not indexed by search engines, but perhaps it’s not that bad if it’s all very focussed on small issues and papercuts.

An idea board seems like a nice idea too, an open source Miro/ Mural perhaps? If it supports voting that is.

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Actually, is there a page in the User manual that contains all of the communication channels and the purposes they serve? I haven’t seen any links to the IRC chat and the like. Maybe there should be a separate header for “Get in Touch!”

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Will devs have a say in the voting results? After all it is them who will do the work. If they will have a say won’t it bother people who have voted? How will a person who hasn’t received any response or vote be handled how will they feel. Will they feel as if their voice is not heard? How will we make it not look like people are neglecting them?

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The devs could make a small (blog) post explaining their reasoning as to why they chose to work on one thing over the other.

It’s a bit of an assumption on my part how this could work. I don’t know if it helps, just discussing it here. :wink:

The irc was listed on the krita website. We can ask @scottyp about it. The website is being redone I think.

For general get jnvolved it is here - Overview | Krita

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Do people follow the blogs? It can be in the official blog on krita.org Which already has stuff like roadmaps and regular release notes and other news. Will it reason given by drvs be able to not make people feel neglected?

The gist of what I am arguing here is in free software unless you participate or actively do something nobody will do anything to make you feel special. As much as devs have the responsibility it is also the responsibility of users to take part in the process. And they need not know how to code. If a person is not ready for how can we make them not feel dejected? Is there any solution to that? Say for example hypothetically I am a brand new user who switched from photoshop with 17 years of experience in using photoshop. I come to forum and make a post and say “I would switch to krita if it had this particular feature” do volunteers or devs knave everything and contact them and first give priority to them to implement it and make photoshop clone for them or do they work according to existing timeline or roadmap just jot to make the user feel neglected?

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I’d never say I’ve spent more time in Krita than most devs, let alone the founding devs. But I can absolutely assure you I have more hours than some devs. That’s besides the point, none of that even matters because my hours in Krita mean nothing to begin with, and I’m not trying to compare time using the program vs time developing.

Devs reading the forums put equal weight on my feedback vs someone who draws once a month and has 10 hours total in the program.

Is that elitist? Genuine question. Should I get rid of the idea that I should have a better idea for what Krita needs to improve than the average artist? Why?

It’s an assumption.

Of course not, A lot of user feedback is… subpar. Just suddenly working on everything that gets suggested without weighing the necessity and technical debt would obviously be terrible, but I think you know that.

Yeah, all the sites and scripts and mods I wrote myself. :wink:

This is a loaded question that has a very nuanced answer. I have to tiptoe around it because I don’t believe the answer is yes, and I don’t believe it is no.

So let me clarify a bit before explaining my frustration again: No, I am not owed anything by any dev at all. I would never feel entitled to anyone’s time or attention for any reason. If my previous messages about talking to them and wasting their time weren’t clear, I consider their work and time and effort with very high regard.

So why am I annoyed?
I guess there is a bit of entitlement there. I personally wouldn’t call it that, no more than the longest-running dev is ‘entitled’ for having more say in how something is coded.

If you replace some words around, you can see why it feels two-faced:
“If you spend 4000 hours developing Krita you earn the right to have a bit more say in the program”
You would reply, “Yeah, that’s about right. Of course, you know how the inner workings of the program operate and know what you’re talking about.”

Now lets replace dev with artist:
“If you spend 4000 hours drawing in Krita you earn the right to have a bit more say in the program”
To which I feel most people would reply, “Wow, entitled much? Do you want a parade and salute when you join the chat?”
It’s demoralizing.

I have no solution to this. The only one I’ve been able to come up with was hiring my own dev or commissioning my own features, which honestly isn’t off the table and I’ll likely be doing sometime.

rating systems don’t work, everyone wants their vote to mean the most so they put 10/10, I’ve seen this on multiple sites I’ve worked on where they thought it’d be a fun idea.
If you want users to truly pick their favorite, have a sorting system. For example:

  • When you upvote an idea, it gets added to your liked ideas page
  • Your liked ideas page is sorted by ‘most wanted’ to ‘least wanted’
  • You can drag the ideas around and place the ones you like the most at the top.

Discord is where I spend most of my time, but I understand why Krita devs use Matrix.

This would be difficult for us who draw uh… interesting… topics, but I think it could be a good idea in general to add a key screen cast.

If a feature request is the highest voted thing in the entire forum by every artist and the devs just decide to ignore it then this just further proves points I’ve been making this entire thread.

I love the idea of Workflow polish Thread.

Its a good way to check how tools are being used and what can be improve or what are the bottle necks.

After all some feature have been implemented with specific way of using it but user end up using it a different way that dev might not have foreseen.

+1 on Having a Road Map. Like i said - that would be nice to see what are planned and what to expect and how the target and how much the last round reach hit the target and what are the bottleneck faced on why some mightve been pushed back.

@Ralek - I lowkey feel you are making the devs out as some antagonistic force who hardly care (My bad if I interpreted wrong) . Thats never been my experience with them. They’re plate is quite full but when they can they would go here check out and ask out suggestion if not what are the suggestion threads and what are their answers in there about? There is some sort of entitlement that you should be prioritized more.

In Krita there are contributors too - they obviously will add what they want and work on what they want - because they are not exactly under control of the main devs. If i decided to work on extending toggles today and propose a merge , its not like they would ban me on doing that .They would check my code and look into if its good enough to me merge even if my chosen feature is not inline with whatever is planned. Like the attempts at adding cmyk mixing? even if those did not end up to merge / they still get check because someone attempted to make them its not like the main devs can say no you can’t do that do this instead.

I remember the IRC chat / but was not sure if its still there because i could not locate the link.

Blogs are not very much followed / i think alot didnt know it exist or how regularly it is used. Alot of the communication already exist it just feel cluttered and seem to be in place most people don’t check.

What makes your entitlement more attention worthy than some other persons entitlement. How will this entitlement calculated? Do dev now need to calculate their number of hours worked on krita to over rule a suggestion?

For me it’s looks like you are basically saying devs should listen to you requests on priority if they don’t you feel that project is not listening to users? Basically you are one of the users and not all of the users ignoring you will not amount to ignoring users. Even then you are not being ignored

Most of the points you are contradicting yourself. You are saying devs don’t listen to you and you feel dejected but at the same time you say some devs helped you. Here you say devs don’t owe you but you feel entitled

There’s a phabricator task for that
https://phabricator.kde.org/T14559

It just take time to implement because I think there’s also a review of krita.org portal

Grum999

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I don’t follow the blog website, but I do read the splash screen updates (which reference the blog articles) I think that’s a great way to spend the time waiting for Krita to initiate by reading the headers. And I go to the blog for the articles I think are worth reading.

That said, even I didn’t know about all the contact channels, so I think it’s also mostly a matter of trying to expose this in Krita’s splash screen as well as the manual. Because i think those are the two main places where people look besides the official website.

Agreed. That’s why I think it’s good to expose this better.

It’s so easy to glance over this part of the splash screen. Maybe there should be a “Get involved?” header that lists the communication channels. I don’t know. But adding the get involved section to the manual would have helped me. I think it’s because both Blender and Krita spread communication across many platforms, it’s easy to get lost. So consolidating things in an overview style (were possible/ feasible) might help alleviate this.

And they need not know how to code. If a person is not ready for how can we make them not feel dejected? Is there any solution to that? Say for example hypothetically I am a brand new user who switched from photoshop with 17 years of experience in using photoshop. I come to forum and make a post and say “I would switch to krita if it had this particular feature” do volunteers or devs knave everything and contact them and first give priority to them to implement it and make photoshop clone for them or do they work according to existing timeline or roadmap just jot to make the user feel neglected?
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Even when there is a proper explanation and roadblock for it? There may be better way than the suggested one. There can be time constraints. There can be other reasons. Will the users now decide how the devs spend their time?

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There definitely is some entitlement here. [and i read whole post before quoting this]

Its not like the devs would know who have used Krita more .
Would you know that I started using krita after Project Mango via David Revoy [2014] was released? NO.
The devs doesn’t know that either. lol.

Do we need to state now how long or how much time we spent for a bug report to be taken seriously? Or That we are pro and whoever has more hours get heard +points on their feature request / get taken more seriously. Or should my voice mater less than yours because you are a pro and I’m a hobbyist.

Is someone testing krita for few weeks looking if its for them to switch and finding a workflow that can be improve ignored because well they still has not spent x amount of time in int. [even though i agree the add x feature from x software post is annoying] when its well presented it can be good.

There are also constraint on why something can’t be implemented. Text Tool had been on the top of request. Why was it not check - because the core code need work before it they can even start checking it again.

Of course devs can lose sight too. That’s why we can remind them. There also instances where a consensus can’t be reach.

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Atleast some actionable items in this thread. We can surely suggest this. May be we can make a new thread for adding more community things on welcome screen. I believe welcome screen will see a overhaul in future when krita gets ported to qt6. ( see I am not a developer but I know this because I stay in irc and participate, any of you can too) There are talks to add featured images of user artwork in it too. This is a good suggestion

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I definitely don’t believe this problem is with the devs themselves. Any direct communication I’ve had with devs (in the past year) has been very positive and understanding, and they’ve given no indication that they don’t care or are annoyed with me. My enemy is definitely not the devs or contributors in any way, if anything the main thing I’m struggling with is in my own head.

My experience? Wouldn’t someone who uses a program more also understand the program more and be able to give more valuable insight into the nuances of working with the program? I feel like I’m going crazy here.

I would hope so? At least in a roundabout way. Who are they making it for? You can use this excuse to explain getting rid of the brush tool:
“The devs got rid of the brush tool and now all the artists are angry and want them to add it back”
“Oh so the users now decide how the devs spend their time?”

I can definitely see it, don’t think I don’t feel bad about it or wish I didn’t.

I stated above that I have no idea how to solve this, it’s likely not even something solvable outside of my own head. That being said I’ve unironically started doing that first suggestion because otherwise I feel like I shouldn’t even try or that my voice has absolutely 0 weight behind it.

Maybe artist opinions are supposed to have 0 weight, I dunno. I’m not used to that.

Then where is the metaphorical barrier you talked about?

So which user will decode the time developers will spend on something? The most experienced one? Will you be the one? Can you guide the developers to drop something and work on other that solves your issue first? What about someone more involved in project and experienced than you? How do we find this top person whose voice should take priority?

Developers will of course take user feedback but ultimately the maintainer will decide what to work on that is how the free software works. If a user feels it is wrong direction they can fork the project and take the management of the fork under their hands.

I feel here is that you feel ignord even when some of your issues are solved by devs you want all the attention. If your voice is not heard you are assuming all artists voice are not heard hence the frustrating tone about devs not making builds for you etc. May be I am wrong. Basically you want some dev to ask you how to steer krita

I think for starters we can link gather out all the communication channels and evaluate them.
Make them more visible. The idea of it in splash screen - I like that too.

It seems most of them exist, but scattered. Collating and informing our community - specially newer members [that maybe long time user] on this communication channels.

I really like the recap, specially the from the community section :smiley: It has the oh yeah that’s our contribution, but again we need volunteers - and we all have life so things are not exactly going to be consistent.

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Check the phabricator link that @Grum999 shared above.

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Fair point. I was considering to make this with the least amount of overhead on existing platforms. You know time spent on administrative purposes can also feel as time wasted.

The idea is that you can show where you are getting stuck. So you just show part of the process and possibly voice it over and talk when and why you are getting stuck. The hotkeys and functions then further help visualise how long a process takes from performing the input to the execution and also shows what you did.

To be honest, this is a bit of a moot discussion. People can easily tell something and it cannot be verified on the internet. On the other hand, it’s not like it’s easy to tell for the devs who spent a long time doing something. I am personally against qualifying ideas by binding them to a specific user. To me, it’s the ideas that count. So if a new user has a great idea, it is more valid than an experienced user with a bad (or lesser) idea. How you value ideas is another discussion in and of itself, so let’s not go into that here.

I do understand where you are coming from. I just think that reality is what makes it difficult. If you are struggling with that, I understand that as well. You want to get something fixed, but if you are not a developer, you can’t. That’s frustrating. Then again, patience is a virtue too. I often switch software to get something done (fortunately, I still have free student licenses). It’s not optimal, but other than learning how to fix it or discuss about possible fixes, there isn’t much you can do about it. Or you would want to hire a developer to fix your needs and to patch it into Krita?