I think the US software community doesn't pay a lot of attention to European software in general, and KDE especially. (As much as it's an international project, a lot of the developers seem to be centered on Europe, especially Germany)

It was born as a part of KDE Office Suite which hadn't wide usage. After community of Krita users grew rapidly (for an FOSS piece without marketing) it was separated from the bundle. Also a good boost was a publishing at Steam in the first month of their Software Store.

The Steam version is a nice way to sell open source software. It has an additional interface designed for tablets, which is open source, but the free builds from krita.org don't include it.

The current steam version is same as the free version, with steam version you get automatic update, The tablet version is Krita Gemini, i think it is the older version, i don't know if it is still on steam, as recently steam version was updated

It's also on the Windows/Microsoft Store which means I get auto-updates.

> rom the about page they've been around for a long time! I'd love to understand the market forces that were in play here.

There are a lot of negative people, and some people just want a magical dropin replacement one to one clone to the proprietary software, they dismiss new comer and opensource tools like these, However things are changing as more and more people are doing art with krita and it is spreading gradually.

> I'd love to understand the market forces that were in play here.

the main market force is people on forums saying stuff like "the icons and menus aren't exactly those of Adobe Photoshop so it is literally unuseable"

I discovered it through this comic a few years ago: https://www.peppercarrot.com/

For some reason it isn't as "standard" as Gimp.

I've heard that Krita is the favorite tool for a lot of indie game designers out there.

Do you know about Gimp, Blender and Inkspace ?

Yes, I am familiar with those. I primarily use Gimp for 2D art with flexible import/export options, and long lamented the lack of a comparable open source/budget competitor since it's markedly less good compared to Photoshop, and Inkscape is very specialized in vector graphics. I'll be spending some with Krita this weekend to see if my excitement is warranted, but seems like there's a vibrant community using this for a while.

If you're on Mac or Windows, Affinity Photo is a pretty good Photoshop alternative for 50 USD. Iirc there's wording about paying for major version upgrades (eg 1.x to 2.0), but for Affinity Designer (their Illustrator equivalent) they've been on v1.x for over 4 years now.

If you don't want to use GIMP/Krita/Photoshop, Pixelmator (Pro) is a good, cheap image manipulator program for Mac. IIRC it costs 30 EUR. I haven't used it much nor for advanced stuff but I find it intuitive, easy, and a fair price.

For what it's worth, I'm in the same boat as you. I've been Linux-only on the desktop since 2003, have a five-digit Slashdot ID, and read reddit and Hacker News daily for a decade.

Yet I had _literally_ never heard of Krita until last year; I was trying to figure out how to edit an image for work using my work-provided MacBook Pro and my boss said "I always use Krita."

Something something XKCD 10,000. https://xkcd.com/1053/

I'm in similar situation, and I have been doing digital painting since the 90s. I found out about Krita about a year and a half ago. Maybe I had heard about it before and forgot or ignored it. It is definitely a formidable alternative to Photoshop for painters and some may find it better at certain tasks and workflows.

I haven't used Blender in a long time, but from what I've seen they've progressed by leaps and bounds too, and many prefer artists prefer it to the commercial alternatives. Solid evidence that open source software can rival or exceed commercial projects for the things that require user friendly UXs.