Why Krita? I can't draw worth a damn. But I can cut and paste. Great for foregrounds. But what if you want a background. Well, obviously you draw the background first, then paste the foreground elements into it. Except (a) you may not know in advance what you want your background to look like; and (b) I wasn't thinking that far ahead and now had the foreground.
Well, gimp employs layers. So the easy way is to create a layer, draw the background over it, save the background layer separately, then load them: first the background, then the foreground. Except, it turns out that gimp doesn't seem to permit separately saving layers. While krita does.
But every recent version of Krita available as a AppImage failed to open. Starting it from a terminal revealed the it was trying to 'mix' its libraries with those provided by my operating system, Fossapup64.
So, after creating a portable --see the discussion here-- viewtopic.php?p=57775#p57775-- I flinched a technique from fredx181's portable firefox, and MikeWalsh:
1) Created a 'containing folder' named krita-portable.
2) Copied the extracted krita folder --just renamed krita-- into it.
3) Literally stole fredx181's 'ff' script from portable firefox.
4) Renamed the script 'kt' and copied it into the krita-portable folder, adjacent to the 'krita' folder.
5) Edited the 'kt' script to just read:
#!/bin/sh
#LAUNCHDIR="$(cd "$(dirname "$0")"; pwd)"
LAUNCHDIR="$(dirname "$(readlink -f "$0")")"
mkdir "$LAUNCHDIR/base" 2> /dev/null
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LAUNCHDIR/:$LAUNCHDIR/usr/${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH} "$LAUNCHDIR/krita/AppRun" "$@"
Note, sorry about the use of 'tiny' for the last line; otherwise it displays as 2 lines which might cause even more confusion.
I don't think the line beginning with 'mkdir' is necessary. But it doesn't hurt.
The 'AppRun' of the last line is what starts krita after the 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH...' instructs it to ONLY look within its folder for libraries. The krita appimage provided the AppRun file as a symbolic link to the /usr/bin/krita binary within the krita folder.
With the 'kt' script made executable, krita starts and seems to run OK when 'kt' is left-clicked.
. Edit: No it doesn't. Have to open a terminal (in the folder) and type kt. Will investigate. But see my post 3 down (after MikeWalsh's).
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Well, now to actually learn enough about krita to actually do what it says it can.
DOWNLOAD from here:
https://krita.org/en/download/krita-desktop/