I understand that krita is part of kde and developed by the kde development team. However, it seems that krita is becoming a seriously good piece of software and as such it is gaining an increasing number of users who don't use KDE as their desktop environment. This leads me to wonder whether it would be possible to make krita less 'bulky' in terms of dependencies and processes. I realise that the reason krita depends on these dependencies is that it is built on them, and needs to use them. However, I get the impression that in many cases, krita uses only a few parts from a kde library, but of course has to install the whole library, which also drags in dependencies that aren't really necessary.

With Qt already installed on my system, installing krita + dependencies takes ~450MB (including kdebase-workspace because without it the gui colours are messed up. It seems that having used this to configure kde, it can be removed, leaving the settings in place, so that's 250MB down, but still... it's inconvenient). It's difficult to make meaningful comparisons because what needs installing depends on what is already installed, but this seems like a lot if I only want to use the one program, krita (I'm sure the rest of the calligra suite is lovely, but I doubt it receives much interest from those outside KDE).

Another issue is background processes. At a glance I see that even after closing krita, several kde processes are using significant quantities of RAM, notably knotify4 and kded4. Krita has nothing it needs to notify me about, especially when it is no longer running.

Is it possible to build various bits of kde with unneeded functionality disabled?

I hope this doesn't come across a rant against krita or kde, because that's not what I intended. I'm just interested to hear peoples thoughts on whether krita could/should be made more 'non-KDE user'-friendly.

Which distribution are you using? Krita shouldn't depend on kdebase-workspace, but kdebase-runtime. Happens often that distribution mess up the packages and install lots of stuff that isn't needed e.g. Ubuntu 11.04 wants to install mysql. What dependencies does your system want to install?

Usually distribution split the Calligra packages, so it should be possible to only install Krita. The kdelibs dependency is quite a big one, but that should be improved once KDE Frameworks 5 comes out. Beside that Krita uses quite a lot of kdelibs.

Some of the processes might be no longer needed after Frameworks 5.0 as that might be taken over by systemd etc.

kdebase-workspace isn't a dependency, but without it, krita uses a clownish colour scheme which I assume is partly my Qt setup, but with kde default colours mixed in. As I mentioned, it is possible to uninstall kdebase-workspace once the configuration has been done, although it will leave you unable to tweak things. Installing a program built on gtk or qt for the first time might require the user to install an extra package to configure the appearance of gtk/qt, but such packages don't pull in 250MB of dependencies.

It looks like the issue here might be that kde uses a single frontend (systemsettings, owned by kdebase-workspace) to configure all aspects of the system, so in order to be able to change one aspect (colours) it needs to first install most of the others.

Building from git, I built and packaged the following parts of calligra:
filters, libs, plugins, servicetypes, templates, krita.
As far as I could make out, these were the minimum required to satisfy krita.

So, to try and summarise my view:
Krita is not a single freestanding application, it is part of a DE. However, the more it can act like a complete application when installed on a non-KDE system, the more attractive it will be to those not using KDE. While the primary focus for the developers will always be krita within KDE, I believe that krita is good enough that it is worth thinking about other users where possible.

I would expect an application that is complete in itself to do the following:
- Present a consistent theme (not use half user theme and half defaults from somewhere else) without user configuration.
- Not leave a considerable quantity processes from a foreign desktop running (and using RAM) when the application is no longer in use.

Hopefully, many of the dependency issues (one of my biggest problem was working out which of the calligra dependencies are required by krita) will be solved when calligra reaches its first release and starts to appear in stable repos.

Oh and I use Arch Linux, with openbox standalone. I used to use KDE for a while, but for me it was too heavy and crashed too often.

Currently, the dependencies I have for calligra-krita look something like this: glew qimageblitz calligra-templates calligra-plugins poppler-qt kdebase-runtime fftw libqtgtl create-svn lcms2 lcms (both of them!? calligra-plugins requires lcms2, calligra-libs requires lcms) kdeedu-marble (calligra-libs seems to require this) kdelibs calligra-filters
(excludes build time dependencies) Do any of these look unneeded? Are there any missing from the list?

EDIT: Marble might be an optional dependency that it thinks is needed because it was present when building calligra-libs.

Well workspace isn't an actual dependency, system settings are only needed to change the look. If the inital look is messed up that is more a problem of the distribution. We have not much influence on that.

From the list qimageblitz isn't used in newer versions anymore. Only one of the lcms libraries would be needed. Marble is optional and only build when present. Also optional are glew (shader support), poppler-qt (pdf import), create-svn (additional brushes etc, which are usually included with Krita), fftw (improves speed on some filter), libqtgtl (for some additional colorspaces). There is a number of other dependencies that are probably already on your system like libpng.

If your distribution has split up kdebase-workspace, then you should be able to install System Settings seperately. System Settings does not depend on any other components of kdebase-workspace.

Without System Settings, you could try starting the style and colours modules however:
"kcmshell4 colors"
"kcmshell4 style"

Although these control modules themselves might be in Workspace, they should also be installable seperately if your distribution has seperated kdebase-workspace however.

I too want to run Calligra Suite (Krita) on a Non-KDE system, ie. ArchLinux/Enlightenment.
here is what I've found as the Minimum Requirements to do so:
https://community.kde.org/Calligra/Buil ... pendencies

hope someone finds this useful.
Reed.