Congrats on a very promising app. It is the first graphics program running on Linux that makes me feel I can do majority of my (fairly limited) graphics work without switching to other OS. Up to this point there was always something that made other apps unsuitable - be it clunky menu, no CMYK support, crashes etc , and I had to revert to Photoshop on Windows.
In terms of functionality Krita covers almost all my needs - especially considering incoming layer styles. Great job folks! There are some things I even enjoy more than in others - for example simple things like using middle mouse for navigation.
From my perspective it is already feature rich. There are only some "bumps" that made me feel Krita slightly lags behind. Hope you won't mind me sharing those.

1. First of all - performance. On larger images basic tools like wand selection take a while to react. Great to hear you are working on this issue.
2. Theme - would love to see a cleaner, more professional and modern looking one. I believe that when aesthetics come hand in hand with good functionality it increases productivity, and in fact you need both for a really good product (not only software). I'm not saying Krita is ugly (especially after discovering a way to change the worst icons , for example green "circle arrow") - but simply put Photoshop and many of its competitors look better (I'm sure you're familiar with PS , but check Affinity Designer, Corel Painter, Sketchbook - all have more coherent look).
3. Workflow refinements . There are still some things that hamper my productivity when working in Krita. For example the way layer tree is organized - each entry takes a lot of space and I don't see an option to color code an entry. Also I think some of the options would work better as a pop-up menus. And in general - cleaning the interface, looking for overlapping functionality and eliminating it when its not necessary.

Those are things that at this point are IMO much more important than more functions.
Other things relate mostly to things I still haven't gotten used to / figured out. Couple of weeks ago I've clenched my teeth trying to find an rgb color code for a sampled color. Simply couldn't find it - not until I've discovered there is Specific and Advanced Color Selector (I had only advanced docked). I'm not sure there's need for both - I think they could be combined into single tool. Oh, and I still don't know howto "lock" / save toolbars, dockers size and position. Mostly size - after each restart I need to set them up again.

But as I've said - Krita is an awesome app. Both thumbs up and I look forward to incoming KS campaign.

1. Performance is a big part of the upcoming kickstarter
2. Theme: that's a combination of many things: the widget theme (breeze, oxygen, plastique), which we don't control, the icon theme, which is being worked on, the color theme, which we ship ourselves and layout issues, which are being tackled by Moritz Molch. That said, honestly, even recent version of Photoshop I find really ugly and Corel Painter is the pits, in my opinion...
3. The layer box and color-coding layers is also part of the upcoming kickstarter, as stretch goals.

The items in the layerbox can be made smaller if you switch to "minimal" mode in the top right corner.

Krita should be able to save the size of all the dockers and restore it automatically. Might be that it's broken on your system.

It's hard to imagine how that can get broken -- but in any case, it's worth trying to save your own workspace using the workspace button -- right-most button in the top toolbar.

Simply couldn't find it - not until I've discovered there is Specific and Advanced Color Selector (I had only advanced docked). I'm not sure there's need for both - I think they could be combined into single tool.

Unfortunately not possible. The code of both is just too different and too complex to fit in one docker.

Saving docker arrangement can be done in the workspace switcher. This is an icon in the toolbar that looks like two overlapping windows. Click that, and you will find a list of presets, and a little box where you can enter a name to save your workspace.

Edit: boud beat me to it.

Hi Przemas, you might be interested in the thread "Make layer visibility easier to notice." if you haven't seen it yet. A lot of possible improvements to the layer's docker are discussed in that thread, so please feel free to participate in there if you have some great ideas!

As for the theme, boudewijn already explained that it mostly depends on the used style. You might want to try the "Oxygen" style (in the package kde-style-oxygen on Ubuntu and derivatives). That being said, I fixed quite a few bugs especially with other styles so I highly recommend to try 2.9.4 once it's available for you.

I absolutely agree with you though that the application still feels like some Franken-Krita. The problem is that lots of different people with lots of different tastes added things to Krita over the years which led to lots of UIs with different looks & feels. While this certainly makes it harder for new and casual users to get into it, all the professional artists who use Krita to earn money are more interested in features and bugfixes as far as I can tell

Kind regards

One feature that really stands out by being different is the references images docker. It's completely different from the rest of Krita (and very fragile, any bug in qimageio plugin crashes krita on startup). It really should be removed or completely redesigned, but so many people use it that removal isn't an option...

Wow, thank you guys for all the answers.

As for theme - I think I can see how many levels of "trickyness" it involves. Programmers have to communicate with artists (and quite often language both sides operate are different - been there, done that ), you have to take into account a whole variety of desktops (Gnome, KDE, Xfce etc), there will always be someone not happy with it and so on. But I believe it can be done and that at one point Krita will get there - it is too cool already.
Atm I use a commercial 3d app based on Qt that while has its shortcomings has a consistent UI and theme ( screenshot, screenshot2 ) .
Oh, and I really should have split the samples I've provided into "consistent-looking" and "useful-consistent-looking" . I agree Painter with all those floating windows is not fun to work with , especially for a start - but the behavior and theme is rather consistent.
At the same time I don't agree about Photoshop - IMO it is consistent, good looking and quite easy to work with. They certainly did something right - I have seen people with zero graphic apps experience try Photoshop for some basic image manipulation tasks and they were able to figure it out - something I can't tell about competitors.
Lastly , mind while talking about theme I'm not thinking only about eye candy. Eye candy is not a design goal - rather a byproduct . I'm thinking about UI that's clean, intuitive (unobtrusive) and coherent.

Will try the tips on the docked window sizes (I'm using 2.9.0). So far the windows stay in place I've left them but they are getting resized to some sort of "default" size after each run. For example I've set "tools" dock to be a single verical column. After re-run it gets back to 2 columns.
After a quick look "save workspace" seems to work - but I had to load those settings manually. Is there a way to load such settings automatically?

@slangkamp: definitely changing layerbox to minimal helps - that's what I did. But still when you start compositing and apply some masks etc you quickly get the impression that the "tree" takes more space than in some of the other apps.

Congrats on new KS launch - supported. And it is great to see major things being worked on .

Maybe we should ship breeze with Krita, actually. It's nice, consistent and if we ship it, we can enforce it. One problem we have is that people can use Plastique, Breeze, Oxygen or even Aqua (on OSX, but only if you enable a light color scheme) -- so we can never predict what Krita will look like. Then there's the system settings for fonts and so on.

It's something we might want to postpone tackling until 3.1.

thanks for giving it a thought Boudewijn . I can surely understand that you wish to postpone such things. With limited resources you simply have to pick your battles.
As mentioned IMO consistent and good looking UI (going hand in hand with functionality and stability) is important thing. And just a thought - as usually when you work in graphics program you are really immersed and "cut out" from the rest of system, maybe concentrating on Krita's own theme, with its own colors / fonts enforce would be a better approach for a start? And when this gets done and Krita look all pro, shiny and functional then maybe a template system?
Damn, I really regret I know almost nothing about Qt and programming as I'd love to play a little with Krita's skin and try to make it more in sync with other apps I use.

mmolch wrote: That being said, I fixed quite a few bugs especially with other styles so I highly recommend to try 2.9.4 once it's available for you.

Atm I'm stuck with earlier version - it takes a while before new versions of Krita hit Fedora repos. I guess that learning howto compile from source on my machine is a good idea .