Then we had a virtual meeting with the whole team of sponsored developers, and allowed people to pick things they were interested in: The result of that was a document where we tried to identify the most important things that were missing, or lacking, in Krita. Turning photo’s into something painterly is not our goal. Photoshop is not really making progress when it comes to painting support, and Corel Painter is not an application we would take as our example: we want to create the most efficient application to create new images with. We sat down, the two of us, and discussed what Krita’s main commercial competition was. Of course, even before the invasion of Ukraine and all the problems that caused, we couldn’t get a full Krita Developers’ Sprint together. So, early 2022, as soon as the lifting of lock-downs allowed, two Krita developers, Halla and Wolthera, sat together in Deventer, to prepare this idea. We wanted to pro-actively determine what we wanted to work on, and then discuss how to do that, and go for it, instead of just reacting to bug reports, wish bugs and feature requests. So, for this year, we decided to take a different approach. But there are now more open bug reports than a year ago. But too often, the problems are with the OS support for tablets, display drivers… And plain misunderstandings. Which is really an admirable amount of effort. That’s not to blame the reporter who went through the lengths needed to register and then write up their problem. A lot of bug reports, it has to be said, are basically not actionable. The years before 2022 were mostly marked by us trying, sometimes desperately, to keep on top of the number of bug reports flowing in. The year was pretty awful, though, with the Krita maintainer getting long COVID (that’s me, Halla…) and being too sick to do anything four days out of seven - and various other upheavals we’re not going to detail because that would not be safe, or would be too private to talk about, we really had a really tough year. This feels a bit miraculous, but there it is.

Like in 20, no members of the Krita team actually died from the ongoing pandemic. If that sort of thing bores you, feel free to skip! This is our, very late, yearly overview of the year past, and look-forward to the year that has just started.

For windows download Krita 5.2.0