14 DAY TRIAL // In a blog post on April 6, 2015, Boudewijn Rempt laid down the plans for the next major release of the best open-source digital painting software, Krita 3.0, which will be ported to Qt5.
When Krita 3.0 is released, which will take a while, it will be the first version based on the latest Qt 5.x technologies. The software is currently powered by Qt 4.x, the port being announced approximately nine years ago.
In the blog post, the Krita developer relieves moments from when he decided to port the application to a new Qt release just because he thought it would suddenly become better.
He also remembers that porting Krita to Qt 4.x was a complete disaster and that it took over six years to get everything the way it was supposed to be from the start.
Version 2.4 of the software, released back in 2012, was the first reliable Krita release that was finally ready for the mainstream. At that point in time, Krita was being distributed as part of the KOffice office suite.
The Krita port to Qt 5.x will take at least six months
Because we always learn from our previous mistakes, the Krita developer informs users that the port to the Qt 5.x toolkit will take at least six months, during which the current version, Krita 2.9, will receive numerous new features and improvements.
"So, to conclude, I suspect that it'll take at least six months before the Qt 5 port of Krita is usable by end users," says Boudewijn Rempt. "Because if there's one thing that I desperately want to avoid, it's losing our userbase just when it's nicely growing because we spend months doing stuff none of our users gives a damn about."
The current version of Krita is 2.9.2, distributed as part of the well-known Calligra office suite. You can always download the latest version of the Krita digital paining software from Softpedia.