What's the reason it cannot simply be installed as a plugin on Linux?

[Lord-Vlad]

I like the convenience of having Krita installed through the package manager of my choice, that's why I am curious about what's the reason behind the patching. For Windows, it seems to work just fine like any other plugin.

[Acly]

No reason why it shouldn't work. You just need to put the files in the right places.

For Windows it's easy because all installations are isolated and have the same structure, which is replicated in the .zip.

For Linux you have some people using AppImage, some Flatpak, and then various distros are free to distribute the files in different places. Krita from package managers is often a bit outdated, and the plugin only works for the latest version, hence the instructions focus on the AppImage.

[Lord-Vlad]

Thanks for the answer.

[ShadwDrgn]

if I were to do it via package manager how would the directory structure work? I've installed other plugins by simply copying the entire zip to a folder in pykrita. Is that what I'd do here? this seems to have a lib folder which i'm not familiar with. I'm not seeing a lib folder anywhere in .local/share/krita which seems to be where my krita files are and is where I installed krita-ai-diffusion as an example.

The krita official documentation seems to think there should be a .desktop file in the zip but i don't see one:
https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/python_scripting/install_custom_python_plugin.html

EDIT: For those curious about this. it looks like this isn't a normal krita plugin and so you have to use the system dirs to copy the files. arch just puts them in /usr/share/ and /usr/lib respectively so sadly you'll have to do this as root, but it does work :)

[Acly]

Yep this is not a python plugin, you can't add new tools that way. And Krita doesn't support loading native plugins from the user folder.