What difference does that make? You don't have to run KDE (heck, I use it on windows). Yes its UI is a separate library from the specific program - any well-factored program will do the same, whether it exposes the separation or not.

> What difference does that make?

• It's more packages I need to download. Doubly annoying because 95% of the packages are just "thin wrapper around foo, because we're too hipster to use libraries directly like peasants".

• It installs system-wide services I have to disable/mask just so other programs don't mistakenly use them because they think I run KDE and they have to integrate into it.

• Oh wait, I can't disable some of these, because Krita itself needs them and now I need to figure out how to make them play nice with my desktop aaaaaarggghhhh

> It's more packages I need to download. Doubly annoying because 95% of the packages are just "thin wrapper around foo, because we're too hipster to use libraries directly like peasants".

"Number of packages" is not a very meaningful metric. The combined filesize isn't that large (not by the standards of an image editor anyway), and under any modern package manager installing a package with dependencies is no harder than installing one without.

> It installs system-wide services I have to disable/mask just so other programs don't mistakenly use them because they think I run KDE and they have to integrate into it.

Really? KDE tends to be a well-behaved crossplatform citizen IME (unlike Gnome) and not rely on anything system-wide. (There was some horribly ill-advised semantic nonsense in KDE 4, but I don't think it ever affected Krita).

I agree with you for point 2 & 3, I also hated installing KDE apps for this exact reason.

But I can't agree on the first one.

I have not checked what these exact thin wrappers are, but most of the time thin wrappers are really useful for testing and switching to another library without being tangled in the old one.

It pretty much follow the "D" (Dependency inversion principle) in the S.O.L.I.D. principles: "Depend upon Abstractions. Do not depend upon concretions.”.

Again, I have not checked the KDE libs you talk about, so I'm assuming this is what these wrappers are used for.

(Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_inversion_principle & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_(object-oriented_design) )

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon_(software) is one such example.

The kdelibs situation has improved a lot in the last couple of years. The team has worked hard to split out the frameworks and libraries from the desktop and apps themselves, so now you only need like 1/5 the KDE desktop.

It's worth taking another look if that was something that put you off in the past.

That is right there with RPM vs DEB debates and "RPM dependency hell."

75 MB appimage download then! https://krita.org/en/item/krita-3-0-released/