Changes Coming to Krita Gemini
by Boudewijn Rempt, Krita Maintainer
It has been a long time since Krita Gemini has had an update. I wanted to let everyone know what has been going on. The last Krita Gemini released happened in 2014 and a lot has changed! We owe everyone an explanation.
First let’s go through the past 4 years…
When Krita first appeared on Steam, we had created two special versions of Krita: Krita Gemini and Krita Sketch. This was not done by the Krita Foundation, but rather by a company called KO GmbH. I was one of the founders of this small company.
The company was mainly founded to work on Maemo and Meego, the new mobile linux based operating systems championed by Intel and Nokia. When Nokia quit, we tried to focus on Krita, but in 2014, KO GmbH went under. There was too little income, and we were too much geeks to be good at sales. KO GmbH handed the Steam account over to the Krita Foundation for a consideration in euros.
In 2015, we released Krita 2.9. It turned out to be very challenging to port Krita Gemini to the Krita 2.9 codebase, because Krita 2.9 could show more than one image in a window, and Gemini was from the ground up built on the assumption that there would never be more than one image per windows. And that was not all. I was out of a job, and Krita did not generate enough income to support me.
I took the step to become a freelance Qt developer. My day job no longer was related to Krita, but outside jobs with things such as Plasma Phone and smart thermostats. In the evenings and during my commutes I tried to keep up with Krita, but I couldn't find the time to port Gemini to the 2.9 codebase. There also wasn’t enough time to keep up with the Steam community. I felt really bad about that. The more time that went by the worse I felt.
In the second half of 2015, we started porting Krita to the latest version of our toolkit, Qt 5. That was a lot of work all by itself, and I found a sponsor ready to allow me to work on that for three months. Now, in addition to the problems we already had, the technical solution we used to display the image in tablet mode in Krita Gemini became impossible.
The Krita Foundation next sponsored another Qt developer to port Krita Gemini to the next version of Krita's codebase and the next version of Qt. We spent a couple of thousand euros on that, which is a large amount of money for us. Our budget is really tiny!
The developer, who used to work at KO GmbH failed to make it work, and we had to conclude that Krita Gemini as a two-in-one application with a tablet gui was dead.
2016 arrived, we had a Qt5 based Krita 3.0, but no replacement for Krita Gemini. At that time, I was still working on smart thermostats. By mid 2016, I was burned out, trying to subsidize my work on Krita through a hectic day job. I failed, and hard. And it was getting harder and harder to contemplate Krita on Steam. I decided to at least halt the lifetime DLC, since it was clear we weren't giving people value for money.
Then came 2017, which was the year the tax authorities descended on us., and it was clear the Krita Foundation would have to stop doing anything that looked like sales, including Steam, so we had to transfer Steam again. By the end of the year, we had recovered, and could start looking at the future. However, all knowledge of how to publish Krita on Steam had vanished. We had found a volunteer who was looking into it, but he was more interested in putting the training dvd's from the shop on Steam.
Now it's 2018. We have decided to put the regular version of Krita Desktop in the Steam shop and try to keep it updated. Similar to how you can get Krita on the Windows store. The funds that we collect from Krita Gemini will continue to go towards new features and bug fixes like it always has.Keep an eye out with future updates as we transition this page into our normal Krita Desktop application.
Again, I really want to apologize for the mess we've been through in the past years. We will do the best we can to straighten things out and be as transparent as possible.
Boudewijn