Today, May 31, 2016, the Krita Foundation has had the great pleasure of announcing the final release of the powerful, open-source, free, and cross-platform Krita 3.0 digital painting software.

After being in development for the past six months, Krita 3.0 is finally here, fully ported to the next-generation Qt 5 technologies. Prominent features of Krita 3.0 include built-in animation support, as well as the ability to work with big canvases and brushes, thanks to the Instant Preview functionality.

"Many of the new features were funded by the 2015 Kickstarter campaign. A big thank-you to all our backers," says Krita Foundation in today's announcement. "The remaining stretch goals will be released with Krita 3.1, later this year. And don’t forget that we’ve still got seven days in the current kickstarter campaign."

We've talked a lot in the past couple of months about the new features implemented in the Krita 3.0 applications, so you should have an idea by now what exactly has been implemented or improved, especially if you've had the courage to use a pre-release version before.

The new features have been detailed by Krita Foundation on the project's website. We can tell you now that the biggest ones are true blue 2D frame-by-frame animation, faster layer workflow, improvements to shortcuts, guides and grids snapping, a bunch of new filters, lots of UI enhancements, and a new manual.

Krita 3.0 is available for download right now for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. You can click the links to download the binaries via our website, but GNU/Linux users should install the software directly from the main software repositories of their distributions.

For example, Krita 3.0 is now available in the Arch Linux repos, but if you can't find it yet and you can't wait until the maintainers of your distro release it, download the portable AppImage packages. Additionally, Krita 3.0 is available now as a Snap for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).