#1137480 krita has very long startup at first launch, reading/caching all fonts

Package:
krita
Source:
krita
Description:
pixel-based image manipulation program
Submitter:
Gregory Mounie
Date:
2026-05-25 18:41:01 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1137480#5
Date:
2026-05-24 10:01:07 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

   * What led up to the situation?

Starting krita for the first time, the launch time on my computer was
dramatically long (I tried Sid and experimental version).

While the splash screen is present with "loading resources", there is
no indication of progress. I believed first Krita was buggy and
looping somewhere. Indeed, I had an old krita configuration .config/
and .cache/ that I removed to check for the "bug", and finally get
things worse :-)

I strace Krita. Krita reads every font files to cache it in its user's
database (`strace krita 2&>1 | grep openat | grep font`). When you
have several thousands of font files on a slow computer, it takes up
to one second per font, thus tens minutes, may be close to the half
an hour or more for me (as I interrupt/start it several times, krita was
partially caching each time).

I have an old CPU, a SSD for the system and the fonts, but an HDD
for my home, for writing the user's database.

I would change the writing in the splash screen to give an estimated
time to complete the font caching: after measuring the time to managed
the first 100 fonts, and counting the total number of fonts.

   * After the first launch, everything is fine

Krita is a very nice tool for sketching and drawing. I am afraid this
first launch could loose some users.

Hope this help
Grégory

#1137480#10
Date:
2026-05-25 18:39:10 UTC
From:
To:
That sounds like the type of bug that should be submitted upstream.  I would
recommend you do so and then mark the Debian bug as forwarded to the upstream
bug report URL.