I have a slight problem whenever attempting to render an animation to a gif :
So as you normally would I go to file>render animation then follow the steps to save it as a gif and it saves everything but then it says "fetching palette" with the loading percentage on the bottom- but it stays on "fetching palette" for quite a long time with no sign of doing anything : causing me to not be able to save my animation as a gif.. Does anyone know if I'm doing something wrong or what it means when "fetching palette" ? I've tried everything but it wont seem to save it as a gif..

.gif images are limited to 256 different colours, chosen from a palette which is created based on the colours used in the image. This helps with file data size reduction. It seems that your rendering process is getting stuck at the conversion to .gif stage, so this is a process outside Krita, associated with ffmpeg trying to render your animation.

In the File - Animation options window, have you entered the location of your installed ffmpeg executable? If not, you can try to find it and enter it. Then it might work. Even so, it might not work.

I had the same problem as you and also failures due to bad codec library calls when trying to render as video when I first started making animations.
Go to http://ffmpeg.org/download.html and choose your OS from the icons shown. Then download the static build for your computer.
This will be a .zip file or a .tar.xz archive. Extract it to give a folder called ffmpeg-etc.etc. then store this folder in a sensible location on your computer. Inside there you'll find the ffmpeg executable, it's called ffmpeg or ffmpeg.exe

In Krita do File -> Render Animation and enter the location of your downloaded ffmpeg executable into the FFMpeg field. Krita will remember this. It should work then so let us know what happens.