Do I know C++ and Qt? No.
Did I need to cover up Kiki's face with a picture-in-picture instance running on another virtual desktop? Yes.
Was I expecting Pacman to let me back down to 4.4.8, the version I had been using prior? Yes.
Is the Krita Konundrum back?
Yes.
The Konundrum came back yesterday after I switched from Debian XFCE to Archcraft, only to see that I didn't know how to downgrade a package in Pacman. Krita, whilst losing ground to Adobe Illustrator and Animate, is still my main art program.
Months ago, I switched from Solus to Debian XFCE for the simple reason that a GNOME lib (libhandy) was forsaken by Solus's devs and repositories, even though I needed libhandy to use Minder, an elementaryOS application that was very useful but had given me multiple headaches over factors outside of the app itself, namely its integration with elementaryOS and its reliance on GNOME. I was also getting anxious about my disk space, which is a factor I've seen myself make a mountain over a molehill for. 128GB just isn't enough in 2022, nor was it in 2021, or even in 2020 when I first made the switch on that very same Samsung SSD 840.
And no, I didn't upgrade to Windows 11. One of my family members got an HP AIO with W11, and the OS wasn't very good at all. I'd rather have given Zorin OS $40 for the Ultimate version of their distro, which includes a desktop layout with a striking resemblance to Windows 11.
Going back to Debian XFCE was at first pleasant until I found out something cruel that Windows Boot Manager does; putting itself over GRUB and not letting me boot into Debian without going through the BIOS setup. My monitor has a very irritating quirk where its HDMI connection to my PC has to be unplugged before entering the BIOS setup and replugging (else have to live with an "Out Of Range" error. Thanks, ASUS.) So, the outcome was simple; I just used Windows. Sometimes I would go through the tedious process to go back into Debian and again realize just how decent the setup was, but it wasn't convenient getting in at a moment's notice, and Windows if I don't hold Shift when shutting down / restarting, would render my secondary HDD read-only. I had hibernating off. When it shuts down, it should always be off and let my secondary drive free.
So, that takes me to a day before yesterday, once again looking to hop distros. A normal kind of nonsense; distro choosers, distrowatch.net, etc. I stumble across a distro called Archcraft that's just a spin of Arch Linux with bspwm and Openbox. The Openbox WM looked like something I could get behind with the same confidence I had going into instantOS and its custom TWM (
the best TWM) I burned an Archcraft image onto my USB and installed it yesterday.
I synced my Windows install's documents, pictures, and valuables back over to my new Archcraft install, and began reinstalling apps to hopefully get back on track with learning C++. Krita was one of them. Arch by nature is a bleeding-edge distro, so its updates are always going to be pushed out. Krita 5.0 was on my Linux install now.
I like having a sense of integration between my Windows and Linux installs, specifically in the filesystem and my docs/pics. My Windows install had Krita 4.4.8, and Krita 5.0 on my Linux install didn't support any vector text made on Krita 4.x, meaning that I had to upgrade my Windows install to 5.0 as well. By the time I found out about an Arch package for downgrading other packages, I had already converted my most important .kra files' text objects over to Krita 5.0's standard. It was too late. And besides, one update later and that time on 4.4.8 on Linux would've been toast regardless, probably because of my stupidity.
I hate Tyson Tan. I hope he inevitably burns in hell.