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KDE/krita
Krita is a free and open source cross-platform application that offers an end-to-end solution for creating digital art files from scratch built on the KDE and Qt frameworks.
Krita is a free, open-source digital painting application built on Qt/KDE, aimed at illustrators, concept artists, and comic/VFX texture painters who want a full-featured alternative to Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint. It's a mature desktop app, not a library or toolkit — you install it and paint, you don't embed it in anything.
The brush engine work is genuinely deep — the benchmarks directory alone (hairy brush, color smudge, liquify, floodfill) shows real performance engineering on pixel-level operations, not just UI polish. CI is unusually rigorous for a desktop app: separate ASAN builds for Linux and Windows catch memory bugs that most C++ GUI projects never test for. It ships a real Python scripting API and plugin system, so it's extensible beyond what the GUI exposes.
This GitHub repo is explicitly just a mirror — real issues, PRs, and CI live on KDE's own GitLab (invent.kde.org), so anyone filing a bug or PR here is shouting into the void. The build is a genuine chore: full Qt/KDE stack plus a pile of vendored 3rdparty dependencies (raqm, gmic, etc.), which makes building from source slow and easy to get wrong without following their build docs closely. Contributors should also know about the AI moratorium in the README — any AI-assisted contributions are banned until at least October 2026, which rules out a common workflow for a lot of developers who'd otherwise want to help.