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Wednesday, 24 September 2025

Today we are releasing Krita 5.2.13! This is a bugfix release containing a number of important Android fixes, courtesy of Carsten Hartenfels, our new Android Maintainer. The release also includes a security fix that affected the work with TGA files.

16K Page Size support

Some devices running Android 15 have so much working memory that Android 15 increased the page size (the smallest unit the working memory is divided up in). To work with on these devices, programs like Krita need some adjustments, or else they won't even run! With Krita 5.2.13 you won't have to worry about this distinction anymore, as 16K page size support has been added.

Saving fixes

One of the most frequent crashes on Android was caused by background saving going wrong. We've overhauled the saving service, fixing crashes when Krita was being shut down or when it is inactive in the background.

Now, operating systems like Android make file system handling a little tricky because they would like to keep each file inside a so-called sandbox, so your program cannot do anything without your explicit permission. This is generally a good thing, but it is very different from how desktop operating systems work, and we're still working on figuring out how to make Krita work more pleasantly while staying inside the sandbox, so look out for that in the future!

Transform fixes

Previously, the transform tool would not work with touch, because it relied on mouse-press, instead of mouse-click, which is what touch events are. We've worked around this, and now you should be able to manipulate the transform widget with your fingers.

Automatically disable touch-painting on devices with stylus present

Now, when Krita detects a stylus present in proximity of the tablet device it automatically disables touch painting for the rest of the session. It lets new users start painting with their stylus right away without visiting Krita's Preferences dialog. If you still want to be able to paint with your fingers and with your stylus at the same time, you can explicitly enable touch-painting in Configure Krita->General->Tools->Touch Painting->Enabled.

Fix for a security issue when loading TGA files

There was a theoretical security issue when loading TGA files, which could cause buffer overflow in Krita. This issue is now fixed in Krita 5.2.13. If you have not yet updated to 5.2.13 we highly recommend you to avoid opening TGA files from unknown sources.

Other

Beyond that, there are two crash fixes.

  • Index Colors: fix crash when filtering non-transparent layer
  • Fix crash in palette docker with add swatch dialog. (Bug 507601)

Download

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.

[!NOTE] We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

Linux

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

[!WARNING] Starting with 5.2.11 has updated the AppImage runtime, which is known to be incompatible with the old versions of AppImageLauncher. Developers of the AppImage runtime suggest to remove or update AppImageLauncher. See this report: Issue 121 More AppImage troubleshooting info is available here: FUSE

MacOS

Note: We're not supporting MacOS 10.13 anymore, 10.14 is the minimum supported version.

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.

Source code

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.2.13/ 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).

Welcome to the August 2025 development and community update.

Development Report

5.2.13 Released

A new bugfix release, Krita 5.2.13, is out. (5.2.12 was an Android-only release skipped in favor of making a release on all platforms.)

It mainly fixes a crash on Android when Krita is in the background, and makes the Transform Tool respond correctly to touch input, both thanks to our new Android maintainer Carsten Hartenfels.

But there are some important fixes for all platforms, so check out the release notes and make sure to update!

Text Tool Rework Progress

The UI for text properties continues to get polished. There's a new in-depth post about text language selection and style preset work, and Wolthera has put out a call for testing and feedback about the way paragraph and character property setting is handled.

Wayland Port Progress

After months of work, Dmitry has implemented initial color management support on Wayland. This is necessary for artists whose work requires color accuracy such as for printing to be able to view their colors accurately on modern Linux compositors.

Google Summer of Code

Krita's Google Summer of Code student for this year, Ross Rosales, successfully completed a project creating a Selection Actions Bar. This feature, which can be toggled in settings under General->Tools, give quick access to various ways to interact with a selection: Select All, Invert Selection, Deselect All, Fill Selection with Color, Clear Selection, Copy Selection to New Layer, Crop to Selection.

Community Report

August 2025 Monthly Art Challenge Results

13 forum members took on the challenge of the "Kiki's Summer Activities" theme. And the winner is… Kiki's Beach Fun by @Lynx3d

Kiki's Beach Fun by @Lynx3d

The September Art Challenge is Open Now

For this month's theme, winner @Lynx3d has chosen "A Breezy Day". The optional challenge is to depict a fleeting moment that would be gone in seconds. Brave the winds and don't get blown away!

Best of Krita-Artists - July/August 2025

This month's Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread received 9 nominations of forum members' artwork. When the poll closed, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:

Raccoon by @elvaira.gromova

[Raccoon by @elvaira.gromova

Rest during the journey by @JayWong

[Rest during the journey by @JayWong

A pirate by @p4to

A pirate by @p4to

Lion Statue by @z586t

[Lion Statue by @z586t

Cara Dune (The Mandalorian - Ch 16) by @FireShepherd

Cara Dune (The Mandalorian - Ch 16) by @FireShepherd

Best of Krita-Artists - August/September 2025

Take a look at the nominations for next month.

Ways to Help Krita

Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors. That means anyone can help make Krita better!

Support Krita financially by making a one-time or monthly monetary donation. Or donate your time and Get Involved with testing, development, translation, documentation, and more. Last but not least, you can spread the word! Share your Krita artworks, resources, and tips with others, and show the world what Krita can do.

Other Notable Changes

Other notable changes in Krita's development builds from August 16, 2025 - September 24, 2025.

Stable branch (5.2.13):

  • Android: Fix a crash when Krita is in the background. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
  • Touch Input: Properly handle taps when touch painting. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
  • Canvas Input: By default, auto-disable Touch Painting if stylus input is used in a session, to avoid conflicting with touch gestures. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
  • Brush Engines: Fix the Speed input being incorrect at the start of a touch drawing brushstroke. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
  • Brush Engines: Fix brush preview outline centering to account for transparent edges. (bug report) (Change, by Jeff Witthuhn)
  • File Formats: TGA: Fix a crash when importing bad TGA files. (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)

Stable branch (5.2.14-prealpha):

  • Android: Fix an issue where the canvas wouldn't show when loading a document until reloading the window. (bug report) (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)

Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):

  • General: Add two empty custom toolbars for users to configure, bringing the total number of toolbars to five. (Change, by Agata Cacko)
  • Text Tool: Add buttons to switch between Preformatted, Inline-wrapped, and Prepositioned text wrapping types. (Change, by Wolthera van Hövell)
  • Assistant Tool: Don't place duplicated control widgets directly on top of each other, and bring them forward when clicked on. (Change, by Aries Moczar)
  • Transform Tool: Add Keep Aspect Ratio action to Transform Tool right-click context menu. (Change, by Agata Cacko)
  • Zoom Tool: Fix regression in zoom target position. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
  • Brush Engines: Switch the default brush outline color from green to magenta. (Change, by Emmet O'Neill)
  • Color Themes: Make some tweaks and updates to the default color themes. Update the Krita Blender theme to match Blender 4 (instead of 2.5). (Change, by Wolthera van Hövell)
  • Python Plugins: Batch Export: Allow specifying an export color profile. (Change, by Kitlith)

Nightly Builds

Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.

Get the latest bugfixes in Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.14-prealpha): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

Or test out the latest Experimental features in "Krita Next" (5.3.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

Tuesday, 23 September 2025

Learn how to apply the virtuous open source cycle model in practice. Learn to design contribution and return paths, measure value, reduce friction, and sustain open source investment successfully. 1. Introduction This is the second article in a series about the virtuous open source cycle model. The first article explained the basic model, showing how … Continue reading From Theory to Practice: Leveraging the Virtuous Open Source Cycle for Long-Term Success

Monday, 22 September 2025

First maintenance release of the 25.08 series is out continuing the focus on stability and polish with many fixes for crashes and regressions as well as user interface and usability improvements.

Some packaging issues caused a small delay for this release announcement, sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks to all the people who help make Kdenlive more stable by reporting bugs, providing patches or sending constructive feedback.

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 18 Beta!

You find a selection of improvements and fixes below. Please have a look at our change log for more detailed information.

Symless is the latest company to officially help fund KDE.

Symless develops Synergy, an open source solution that allows users to share a keyboard, mouse, and clipboard across several computers at the same time, without extra hardware and regardless of whether they are using Linux, Windows, macOS, or a mix of all of the above.

Becoming a Supporting Member of KDE is a natural step for us", stated the Synergy team representative. "Synergy is heavily rooted in open source, and we want to give back to the community that made it possible. By supporting KDE financially and contributing to upstream projects like Deskflow, we’re helping ensure open source software remains sustainable for both enthusiasts and enterprises”.

It’s exciting to see organisations in our ecosystem participate alongside KDE and Plasma in creating next-generation workflows for everyone", says Aleix Pol, president of KDE e.V.. "We’re glad to welcome Symless as a KDE Supporting Member and value their continued commitment to Open Source.

Symless joins the other supporters, KDAB, basysKom, Haute Couture Enioka who help fund free open source software and development through KDE e.V.

Sunday, 21 September 2025

The beginnings

Over 24 years ago, our kwrite-devel@kde.org mailing list started with:

From: Scott Manson

To: kwrite-devel@max.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de

Date: Wednesday, February 21st, 2001 at 21:47

Subject: [Kwrite-devel] I just wanted to be the first to post here )

Welcome to kwrite-devel

I hope this is an active list and we can attract some more developers Anyone have any ideas on coding style,enhancements problems please feel free to post your questions/comments here.

or, depending which mail arrived faster in your inbox:

From: Waldo Bastian

To: kwrite-devel@kde.org

Date: Wednesday, February 21st, 2001 at 21:50

Subject: [Kwrite-devel] Welcome to this mailinglist.

Hello,

Welcome to the kwrite development mailinglist. *test*test*

Cheers, Waldo

The journey

Like the first mail wanted, that list was very active for a long period of time.

The initial posters no longer are active in the project, but some people like me still stick around even after more than two decades.

A lot of important design decisions were discussed on the mailing list and many user questions got answered.

The end

The list traffic slowed down more and more over the last years even as the actual amount of contributions (and presumable the user base) did increase.

Reasons are for sure that for development, we use mostly our KDE GitLab instance for communication. It is just that easier to couple discussions with code there and link development issues to merge requests or commits. I can not remember any serious discussion on larger development topics outside our GitLab in the last years.

For users I assume mailing lists are just too arcane today. Perhaps that is a misconception I have, but at least from most people I know in real life, most of the online support questions went of to either websites or random other channels. Some people survive without any mail account beside the one needed to create some online accounts or install thei mobile phone.

I need to moderate away at least 10 to 100 spam mails for any real mail on the list, that is just a not needed overhead nobody should waste time with.

Therefore in the near future we will close that list, it will not get a 25 years birthday party :-)

But where to ask & discuss stuff now?

I already updated our documentation and web site to point to the current contact points.

In short:

Many Kate developers and users are active on random social media and Co., too. But the above mentioned places are the ones that should be preferred.

Comments?

A matching thread for this can be found on r/KDE.

Like every year, one of the highlights is Akademy! This time we were in Berlin, making it quite easy to get there from Hamburg:) The weather was surprisingly nice, especially when heading out in the evening to try lots of different restaurants. And of course - since being in Berlin - you gotta try a local Döner there :D.

One talk I was particularly surprised about was Saturday’s keynote “Open by Design: How Governments Can Lead the Shift to Digital Sovereignty” by Alexander Rosenthal. Besides the information about OpenSource-Software being used on different levels of federal/state/local, the aspects of OpenData. This made me realize that software is not the only thing one should focus on being open.
Also, the huge amount of memes in the slides made the talk super refreshing and a nice start into Akademy!

Nate’s talk “Minding the Big Picture: Opportunity From Chaos” also fit this topic. OpenSource can provide a stable foundation and reduced dependence on individual companies.

My main development focus and also the most frequent topic of the blog is the Clazy project. Akademy is a good occasion to tell other people about it. So I took the occasion and held a fast-track talk about Clazy to tell how awesome and useful it is.
It was also quite good to get people talking about it and share their ideas/problems.

I also did a decent amount of coding on Clazy. This included a request from aacid about Clazy not working properly with a Qt variant that is build into a specific namespace. This was quite the rabbithole, but I managed to get the passing tests from 50% to 90%. The last few edgecases are not as relevant if most of Clazy works properly. For the use-arrow-operator-instead-of-data a false-positive is fixed where the check complains if you do a .data() call and then cast the pointer. This is in most cases needed, if not, clang-tidy should warn about unneeded casts.
Finally, fixits for detaching-temporary and detaching-member are more reliable when multiple calls are chained.

The biggest surprise though came at the Akademy awards. I am very honored to have received one, this left me quite speechless.

Me finally catching some words after getting the Award <3

This also means I am responsible for choosing the person for next year’s award. So you better get busy doing cool stuff 😎👀.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who helped organize Akademy and made it as awesome as it was!

Saturday, 20 September 2025

Screenshot of Kaidan in widescreen Screenshot of Kaidan

Kaidan 0.13.0 is out now! And it comes with a bunch of shiny new features.

Most of the work has been funded by NLnet via NGI Zero Entrust with public money provided by the European Commission.

Multi-Account Support

Kaidan supports the simultaneous usage of multiple accounts now. Imagine you could use the same chat app at work and with your friends. All your favorite and accustomed features would always be accessible without switching apps. It is possible with XMPP and finally with Kaidan too!

In order to quickly distinguish the account a chat belongs to, there is a small avatar of the corresponding account in the corner of a chat’s avatar. Furthermore, Kaidan makes sure that you do not accidentally add a new contact to the wrong account. That is achieved by selecting the account before you enter the contact’s chat address or scan their QR code. The same applies to the group chat actions.

Account list and actions

Secure Password Storage

The account passwords are stored in the device’s password manager. You do not need to keep passwords in your mind. Instead, you can use random ones. They are securely stored in a central place.

Mark Messages

If you already read the latest messages from a contact but do not have time now to respond, you can simply mark them. A separate counter is shown for the marked messages. Take your time and come back to those messages later. You will not forget to reply anymore!

Marked messages

Forward Messages

You can forward messages from one chat to another. After clicking the corresponding context menu button, you can choose a chat to forward the message to. By default, only the chats of the current account are listed to make it as simple as possible for you. But you are able to list chats of other accounts as well.

Once you selected a chat, the message is added to its input field. You can directly send it or adjust it beforehand.

Context menu with buttons to mark or forward the message

Changelog

There are several other improvements. Have a look at the following changelog for more details.

Features:

  • Add support for using multiple accounts simultaneously (melvo)
  • List accounts and show button to add new accounts (melvo)
  • Show dialog to select account for global action such as adding a contact (melvo)
  • Allow to enable/disable accounts instead of connecting/disconnecting them manually (melvo)
  • Update nicknames of own accounts once connected (melvo)
  • Show small account avatars next to regular avatars if multiple accounts are used (melvo)
  • Hide global drawer handle on chat if window is narrow (melvo)
  • Use PNG/.png instead of JPEG/.jpg for thumbnails to allow transparency (melvo)
  • Use AAC/.m4a instead of MP3/.mp3 for voice messages to improve compatibility (melvo)
  • Provide size of sent images to recipients allowing receiving client to scale thumbnails to size of original image (melvo)
  • Provide size of generated thumbnails to recipients (melvo)
  • Increase size of generated thumbnails (melvo)
  • Show circle instead of bar for upload/download progress (melvo)
  • Try all providers on connection error during automatic registration (melvo)
  • Add message forwarding (melvo)
  • Enable voice message recording via Flatpak (melvo)
  • Store account passwords encrypted if password manager is available (fazevedo)
  • Apply consistent criteria for all message corrections (melvo)
  • Add support to mark messages locally in order to reply to them later or to quickly find important messages (melvo)
  • Reuse SASL 2 user agent and FAST token on every restart for faster connection establishment (melvo)

Bugfixes:

  • Fix selecting media via long press in media overview (melvo)
  • Fix OMEMO initialization (melvo)
  • Fix displaying geo location map (melvo)
  • Fix showing hints on invalid input of various input fields (melvo)
  • Fix name/date of chat list item moving if counter for unread messages dis-/appears (melvo)
  • Fix counter for unread messages (melvo)
  • Fix handling removed message reactions (melvo)
  • Fix canceling personal data sharing via contact details (melvo)
  • Fix finding existing notifications for personal data sharing requests (melvo)
  • Fix cursor behavior in message input field by allowing vertical cursor movements while participant picker is closed and prohibiting horizontal cursor movements while participant picker is open (melvo)

Notes:

  • Kaidan requires QtKeychain 0.15 now
  • Kaidan requires QXmpp 1.11 now

Download

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Packaging status

This post is to celebrate a few things despite the events that are clouding our feelings. 😠

Another thing to not celebrate is the slaughtering by Sourceforge of my developer web site, which they are calling "sunsetting", by October. I've already migrated it

On the other, brighter hand, I'm celebrating this week La Mercè, which is the local festivity of Barcelona.

 Castellers of Barcelona
 
Another event to celebrate is the first 2 million downloads of VMPK for Linux, Windows and Mac. The Sourceforge statistics do not include the installs thru Flatpak, but you may realize that more than 75% of the Sourceforge downloads are the Windows packages. The 2 mil download happened some past day of this year 2025. I've promised a celebration, and now, I have released the Android port of VMPK under the GPLv3 license in GitHub.

VMPK Screenshot

You may download it from GitHub (source code and APK), or you may get it from the IzzyOnDroid repository which is available in the F-Droid app, but also on Neo-StoreDroid-ify,  and the unofficial IzzyOnDroid app.

If you already have the F-Droid app, you only need to add the IzzyOnDroid repository in Settings>Repositories and install it today, or you may prefer to use the official F-Droid repo.

I would like to add to the celebration a video live streaming concerto, but I am too lazy and odd playing for that. Better use this wonderful rendering of the Tchaikovsky Violin concerto by TwoSet Violin, with Brett Yang playing the soloist and Eddy Chen the rest of the orchestra. Enjoy!