While Pino is busy packaging Krita 3.1.1 for Debian, you can easily run the latest Krita by getting the official appimages that I prepare myself. (Being the Krita maintainer and project lead.)

Thank you, I was hoping to get an answer like this!

I also noticed that 3.1.1 is available on ubuntu snap. At this point I am not sure if I should go with snap or appimage. Either way, it is great to get packages directly from the developers!

Thanks for Krita!

Chrome has its own deb repository -- maybe more active projects need this too. (Maybe there's a service to be had hosting and configuring repos?)

I'm on Xubuntu 16.4 and I have 2.9.7 installed. I missed the entire year of developments. 16.10 has 2.9.11 released Feb 4th. 17.4 has 3.1.1 but won't be released for ~4 months. Maybe we should blame Ubuntu for 6 month release cycles, or me for not upgrading, but regardless of the cause, Krita users don't have the new version.

> we should blame Ubuntu for 6 month release cycles

16.04 and onward can now have apps decoupled from the OS release for apps that provide snaps, like Krita does. `snap install krita` will get you 3.1.1.

Thanks! I noticed the /snap directory, but didn't know snap was installed and usable.

Worked on 16.10 and I'll use this on 16.4 too.

Isn't that more dependent on your distro than anything else? On openSUSE Leap 42.2, my default is 3.0.1.1, and I could add the less-tested but realistically fine KDE:Extra repository for the latest version. Fedora seems to be shipping 3.1.1 as well. Arch and openSUSE Tumbleweed are also on 3.1.1.

> BUT most of their work is lost to us due to the way distros handle external software.

Distributions put a lot of work into making sure that software they package is managed and handled in a way that their users like. Your example, Debian, is a distribution that favours stability above all else -- so is it a surprise that features are not merged into packages that often? There are many distributions (openSUSE Tumbleweed, Antegros, Arch Linux) that are far more rolling release and have newer packages.

If you want new software, use a distribution that gives you what you want. Don't blame the distribution for providing what the majority of its users (and community) want.

Hopefully Snap and FlatPak would change that :)

It seems it is already available for appimage and snap:

    $ snap find krita
    Name   Version  Developer  Notes  Summary
    krita  3.1.1    krita      -      Krita: the free digital painting studio

For the record, the latest apt version on ubuntu is 2.9.7

What do they do?

As far as I can tell, they are "fat" distribution packages which are independent (within reason, I guess) of the Linux distro. The aim seems to be to get rid of dependency hell and dependency on exact Linux distro versions, at the cost of larger packages. They also sandbox the app. I'm not sure I understand the disadvantages, besides the larger package size due to redundant libraries.

Hmm, so something like an LXC container? That's interesting, I'll look into it. Thank you!