We have started the release process for the next feature release of Krita today! This release is the culmination of years of hard work. From the same codebase, we're building both Krita 5.3, based on Qt5, and Krita 6.0.0. based on Qt6. Krita 6 is not yet available for Android or ChromeOS because Qt6 is unstable on those platforms.

Highlights

To learn about everything that has changed, check the release notes!

Text Object

The text object has been completely rewritten, as have all the tools to handle text. You can now edit text on the canvas, make text wrap inside vector shapes and put text on a vector path. We support most if not all scripts fully as well.

A variety of technical blog posts were written on the topic: Fonts, Open Type, Font Metrics, various other properties, Text in Shape and Type Setting Mode.

Wayland Color Management Support

A Krita 6-only feature, on Linux, we now support Wayland color management support when Krita runs in native Wayland mode. Note that the only officially supported wayland compositor is KWin. If you use another compositor and find an issue, test with kwin first whether that issue reproducible.

Tools

There is a completely new tool: a knife tool for vector objects, for merging and splitting vector objects. This is extremely handle when creating comic page layouts. Other tools have been extended or have improved performance. For instance, the freehand drawing tool has a pixel-art stabilizer and the liquify transform tool is much faster.

Assistants

Configuring assistants has become easier and there's a new curve-linear perspective assistant.

Filters

There are new filters: propagate colors and color overlay mask. All blending modes have been checked for correctness when working in HDR.

Dockers

The recorder docker now can capture in real time. Dockers can be added to the popup palette.

Brush Engines

Among other improvements, the pattern option has been extended with a soft texturing mode.

File Formats

There is support for a new file format, Radiance RGBE. Additionally, JPEG-XL support has been improved a lot, just in time for Googles volte-face on JPEG-XL support. And... Text objects in PhotoShop files now be loaded as text! You can save text to PSD as well, but only in a limited way.

Python Plugin API

The Python plugin API has been extended with an API for generating brush strokes, new user interface objects and new methods for existing classes. There are also new python plugins.

Krita 5.3 Downloads

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-5.3.0-beta1-setup.exe
• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-5.3.0-beta1.zip
• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with 5.2.11, the minimum supported version of Ubuntu is 22.04.

• 64 bits Linux: krita-5.3.0-beta1-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

• MacOS disk image: krita-5.3.0-beta1.dmg

Android

We consider Krita on ChromeOS as ready for production. Krita on Android is still beta. Krita is not available for Android phones, only for tablets, because the user interface requires a large screen.

• 64 bits Intel CPU APK
• 64 bits Arm CPU APK
• 32 bits Arm CPU APK

Source code

You can build Krita 5.3 using the Krita 6.0.0.source archives. The difference is which version of Krita you build against.

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/unstable/krita/5.3.0-beta1/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source .tar.gz and .tar.xz tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

Krita 6.0. Download

NOTE: The main feature of the 6.0 release is that it uses Qt6. This means it is buggier than 5.3, having both the 5.3 bugs and Qt6 related bugs. If you have no need for the Krita 6.0 features, we recommend you use 5.3 for testing.

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-6.0.0-setup.exe
• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-6.0.0.zip
• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

• 64 bits Linux: krita-6.0.0-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

• MacOS disk image: krita-6.0.0-signed.dmg

Source code

• krita-6.0.0.tar.gz
• krita-6.0.0.tar.xz

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/unstable/krita/6.0.0-beta1/. and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source .tar.gz and .tar.xz tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

This year was my first year attending FOSDEM. I was encouraged to submit a talk and it got accepted. My talk was on Design Systems applied to Open Source projects.

In our case, I related the story and learnings from using a design system for the Plasma desktop. I outlined things that are pending or missing in this process.

I did my best to convince the audience to switch to Plasma and it seems a few of them changed their mind by the end of the talk.

This talk is a variation on my previous talk at Akademy 2025. Without further delay, here is the video recording of my talk. Note that the audio is not the best.

A recent toot of mine got the response “friends don’t let friends use GPG” which, I suppose, is true enough. It certainly isn’t the attestation-friendly thing to use, and the opsec failures that are so easy with GPG-encrypted mail make it a hazard there. But for some things it’s all we’ve got, and I do like to sign Calamares releases and incidental FreeBSD things. And I am nominally the maintainer of the security/gnupg port on FreeBSD. So gpg.fail notwithstanding, here’s notes on my 2026 GPG key update.

Previously in 2024 and 2025 I wrote down basically the same things:

• Things expire in about 13 months and I’ll have to remember then again,
• You can find my pubkey published on my personal and business sites,
• FreeBSD signature information is used rarely, but is available in the FreeBSD developers OpenPGP keys list,
• Codeberg will have signed commits in the Calamares repository with these keys.

sec   rsa4096/0x7FEA3DA6169C77D6 2016-06-11 [SC] [expires: 2027-02-03]
      Key fingerprint = 00AC D15E 25A7 9FEE 028B  0EE5 7FEA 3DA6 169C 77D6
uid                   [ultimate] Adriaan de Groot <groot@kde.org>
uid                   [ultimate] Adriaan de Groot <adriaan@bionicmutton.org>
uid                   [ultimate] Adriaan de Groot <adridg@freebsd.org>
uid                   [ultimate] Adriaan de Groot <adriaan@commonscaretakers.com>
ssb   ed25519/0x55734316C0AE465B 2025-03-04 [S] [expires: 2026-08-26]
ssb   cv25519/0x064A54E8D698F287 2025-03-04 [E] [expires: 2026-08-26]
ssb   ed25519/0x14B6CC381BC256D6 2026-02-03 [S] [expires: 2027-02-28]
ssb   cv25519/0xD716006BBA771051 2026-02-03 [E] [expires: 2027-02-28]

Hello everyone!🎉

Welcome to my first blog!

I am Sayandeep Dutta, an undergraduate at SRM University. I learned about the awesome mentorship program, Season of KDE.

Getting Started

I started contributing to Mankala in December 2025. Got to know more about the project, interacted with mentors, and started with some small merge requests. I really like contributing to Mankala. Mankala has been a very interesting game, and the guidance from the community is really good.

Week 1: Development & Design

In my first week, I had set up Mankala on my Ubuntu machine and started with the development. I created mockups for the proposed UI changes in MankalaNextGen. The mockups mainly included the main game page, a login page, a home page, and some other pages in the game, which were created and worked upon by me on Figma.

Progress So Far

I had created a merge request updating the MainMenu. Well, there are a couple of pages and components we need to work on, and the Main Menu is the most essential one to start with.

What's next?

In the upcoming week, I plan to:

• Complete the rest of the UI updates.
• Start implementing the new theme of MankalaNextGen.

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more updates. 👀

Introduction

Recently, me and my friend Shivang got selected for KDE’s mentorship programme, Season of KDE 2026.

https://mentorship.kde.org/blog/2026-01-21-sok-26-welcome/#implement-font-subsetting-when-saving-files-in-okular

Our proposal included implementing font subsetting in their PDF reader, Okular.

A Brief Overview of Fonts

Font files are of many extensions; the most common ones include TrueType (.ttf) and OpenType (.otf) which are binary files containing data organized in specific tables.

Both of which are really similar (they both share the same structure involving tables for storing certain types of data). They primarily differ in the fact that TrueType uses quadratic Bézier curves while OpenType uses cubic ones.