Pinta crashes after doing exactly one operation without fail for me. I appreciate the work done by people on it but my experience with it has been terrible.
I'm guessing you're running it on Ubuntu or Debian, or a derivative. The packaged .debs are sorely outdated and buggy. If you're on Ubuntu or similar, you can add a ppa[1] for the daily builds which in my experience are much more stable than the old .deb releases. If you're on another distro or OS there may be a current release for you here[2]. Or, if you'd just prefer building from source, you can get it from their github repo[3].
Wow - a Linux port of a large, complex, old school .NET app like Paint.NET is a higher bar for cross-platform UI than I was aware .NET supported at this point
Yeah, up until 3.x Paint.NET was released under a MIT license in a source available sense (no outside contributions accepted, just source dumps with releases). The author didn't like when people would relabel paint.net and release it (sometimes for a fee), so he stopped doing that somewhere during 3.x.
Pinta is based on using the engine for one of those with a new Gtk# UI. Though at this stage a lot of that's been rewritten, so it's pretty much just some filters that are used as-is from old Paint.NET.
Even though Paint.NET moves much slower these days, Pinta has moved even slower and the UI rewrite was never as polished as Paint.NET's WPF UI.
Pinta is basically unusable. It's a port of the last open paint.net source from over 10 years ago. Paint.net went closed source at this time due to plagiarism issues.
Hopefully .net 5 moves us closer to having a Linux version!
Surprised to see this downvoted, I've been using Pinta as the Paint.NET replacement on Linux and it's been pretty stable so far.
Though I do remember accidentally installing it from the default Ubuntu repositories once and it kept crashing really often. Turns out that version is almost 6 years behind the current stable release.
I use Paint.NET for a lot of quick tasks at work, and I have just begun playing with scripting it. It loads quickly, has nicer tools than just MS Paint, and it's getting better each year. I used to play with GIMP and Script-Fu, because I love Scheme and Script-Fu was fun and nicely integrated. The .NET platform is really making a lot of strides this year. Let's see how my C# compares to my Scheme-Fu!
I love Paint.NET, but their distribution system is super scummy. I tried to share it with some co-workers and realized you can't just give non-technical people a link to the project site or they are extremely likely to end up downloading some kind of spyware.
not as bad as described, but still: https://www.dotpdn.com/downloads/pdn.html, the linked site to download if not using the Windows Store, has small text "To download, please click the Free Download Now link to the right." at the top, immediately followed by a google ad slot - which at least for me loads an ad with a big blue "DOWNLOAD" button (well, when I turn adblocking and Firefox' inbuild anti-tracking thing off obviously).
They've cleaned it up even within the last 6 months. There used to be Play Store ads with big "Install" buttons to the top, right, and maybe even bottom of the actual download.
love paint.net. so many advanced features for a “basic” app. but why is rotating still unintuitive? is there a trick that i’ve missed or using the layers menu still the way?
You could select the area you want to rotate, then with the move selected pixels tool (m) move your cursor just outside one of the selected corners to rotate with your mouse.
Though this will not rotate the base canvas, so it might not be useful in all cases.
My favorite app to make pixel art. Unfortunately last time I tried it, it wouldn't run through Wine. I've never found an alternative on Linux that I liked as much.
Interestingly, Paint.NET now uses a self-contained .NET 5 packaging. This means on a fully updated Windows 8.1, 10, or 11, it will work out of the box. On Windows 7 SP1, you'll need to manually download and install Platform Update for Windows 7 to get it working. It won't work on Windows 8.0 or earlier than 7 SP1 (7 SP0, Vista, etc).
Not sure I'm a fan of that. That's over 300 MiB down the drain for no apparent reason since even 7 years old systems (e.g. Windows 8.1) can just install the runtime system-wide without issue.
If you follow the developer on Twitter[1], he's tried every alternative approach and they just didn't work for various reasons. He's been very open about his process.
Interesting stuff. I understand the approach from a deployment perspective (makes it much easier to support multiple platforms), but I still hate the idea of basically having 300+ MiB of duplicated data on my drive.
If only WinFS would've worked or NTFS would have built-in de-duplication...
They are deploying an entire copy of the .NET runtime with the app. This is convenient for the app developer since they can test the combination of app and runtime and make sure everything works.
While .NET does support trimming unused classes, methods, and DLLs, there are two things that prevent it from being used in this app. First, the .NET Windows GUI does not officially support trimming. Secondly, Paint.NET supports binary plugins. So at build time Paint.NET has no way to know what plugins will need, so it has to keep everything.
So you download the "portable" version, i.e. explicitly ask to please come with all dependencies in one archive, and then complain that there are ... dependencies in the same folder?
I'm failing to find any ads at all on their site. I tried to follow every possible path from getpaint.net to a download and couldn't find a single ad (ublock etc. disabled ofc). Takes more clicks than really necessary, but I don't see any way to download the wrong thing.
The only thing "objectionable" (scare quotes intended) is that the version available on the Microsoft store is paid even though the software is freely available. I believe they aren't even allowed to reference the fact that it's free elsewhere on the MS store page. Certainly a weird situation, but not something I'd lose sleep over either tbh.
Edit: Oh, and of course certain cites (e.g. chip.de) out-SEO the real site to peddle their own version of it. And, who would have thought, Windows Defender immediately barks that the chip.de version is trojan-riddled...
It doesn't seem to be as bad now, but there are definitely ads there. IIRC to download the desktop version you have to click trough 3 pages, and each used to have at least one ad only saying "download now" that looked like a convincing button.
I don't see any misleading links at all. It takes more clicks than it should to actually get to the download, but there was nothing malicious on any of the pages.
Sad, that it is not running on macOS. For the last few years I used Gimp, but I have a feeling that Gimp is getting more and more unintuitive nowadays (if it ever was intuitive).
Recently I needed to do some ad-hoc drawings and I found myself using one of these online paint clones. They are not as comfy as desktop apps but they are doing the job good enough.
I would really like to see Paint.NET running on macOS. I think MS efforts for making .NET cross platforms are somehow half-assed. They ported just so much to run web apps and REST services, but totally gave up on GUI stuff. Maybe it's their strategy to lock up devs to windows machines, as there are many tools like ILSpy that .NET devs often use.
The community answer, the last time I checked, was AvaloniaUI (https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia) which is cross platform port of WPF (at least XAML based). ILSpy is already ported to it (https://github.com/icsharpcode/AvaloniaILSpy) but it runs poorly on Linux & mac (I have experienced random crashes and other UI problems). I hope the project will do well and within a year or two we will also see a port of Paint.NET to it.
I caved in and bought Pixelmator for Mac OS. It's actually nice to have an editor native to Mac OS that isn't cobbled together ancient UI and code a la Adobe Photoshop.
If you want something with gimp-level features in a slightly neater package you might try krita instead. It has a more familiar look you might expect from a digital drawing program.
Most major issues I've had with gimp have been fixed in the last few years but it's still not a very elegant UI and some things remain counter-intuitive.
It’s not something you can paper over with the theme. Basic things like copy/paste are broken depending on how you use them, changing brush size is surprisingly clunky, etc. The GIMP UI has been awful for at least 20 years. I have a long list of complaints about the GIMP, but at least it does some of the basics and it doesn’t crash very often.
> but I have a feeling that Gimp is getting more and more unintuitive nowadays (if it ever was intuitive).
I want to love Gimp, its interface and window layout is aesthetically pleasing to me for a pro-level graphics program.
But as a non-pro, I have to google how to do even simple stuff b/c it's not discoverable or obvious from the interface. Just the other day I had to google how to draw a circle around something in a digital photo, which is about the simplest operation you could want to do. You can't just circle something with the lasso/elliptical select tool, there's more to it.
I can't fault Gimp too hard, though, it's aiming for pro's and power users, which I'm not. Frequent Gimp users will quickly learn Gimp's ways of doing simple things, and then move on to the harder stuff.
While historically quite useful, I swapped to Photopea.com and haven’t looked back. It continues to amaze me how well it works and how broad its feature set is.
Paint.NET is non-free software ... for an extremely petty reason.
The reason? Someone new to programming changed the author in the about box and published it on their website.
Well, the author sure showed those terrible plagiarizers by making the project non-free. (Meanwhile, it is as easy as ever to modify .NET applications without source access - see e.g. the numerous mods for Unity games.)
81 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] thread[1] https://launchpad.net/~pinta-maintainers/+archive/ubuntu/pin...
[2] https://www.pinta-project.com/releases/
[3] https://github.com/PintaProject
Pinta is based on using the engine for one of those with a new Gtk# UI. Though at this stage a lot of that's been rewritten, so it's pretty much just some filters that are used as-is from old Paint.NET.
Even though Paint.NET moves much slower these days, Pinta has moved even slower and the UI rewrite was never as polished as Paint.NET's WPF UI.
Hopefully .net 5 moves us closer to having a Linux version!
Though I do remember accidentally installing it from the default Ubuntu repositories once and it kept crashing really often. Turns out that version is almost 6 years behind the current stable release.
https://deadbeef.sourceforge.io/
https://github.com/1j01/jspaint
https://jspaint.app/
Developers should be compensated for their work, just like any other professionals.
[1] https://twitter.com/rickbrewPDN
If only WinFS would've worked or NTFS would have built-in de-duplication...
What's up with windows desktop app development? is it really THAT bad?
https://i.imgur.com/pkPSq7k.png
They should statically ship what the program needs, nothing less, nothing more
at least it's a native program, even if it's as bloated at paint.net
What do you mean a native program? What makes Gimp a native program for Linux but doesn't make Paint.NET native for Windows?
While .NET does support trimming unused classes, methods, and DLLs, there are two things that prevent it from being used in this app. First, the .NET Windows GUI does not officially support trimming. Secondly, Paint.NET supports binary plugins. So at build time Paint.NET has no way to know what plugins will need, so it has to keep everything.
it smells junk software and tasteless/careless developpers
I complain about the size of the folder, and the insane amount of DLLs the program probably don't use
The only thing "objectionable" (scare quotes intended) is that the version available on the Microsoft store is paid even though the software is freely available. I believe they aren't even allowed to reference the fact that it's free elsewhere on the MS store page. Certainly a weird situation, but not something I'd lose sleep over either tbh.
Edit: Oh, and of course certain cites (e.g. chip.de) out-SEO the real site to peddle their own version of it. And, who would have thought, Windows Defender immediately barks that the chip.de version is trojan-riddled...
_edit_
Example, every page used to look like that for years: https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/25741-fake-download-links-...
Recently I needed to do some ad-hoc drawings and I found myself using one of these online paint clones. They are not as comfy as desktop apps but they are doing the job good enough.
I would really like to see Paint.NET running on macOS. I think MS efforts for making .NET cross platforms are somehow half-assed. They ported just so much to run web apps and REST services, but totally gave up on GUI stuff. Maybe it's their strategy to lock up devs to windows machines, as there are many tools like ILSpy that .NET devs often use.
The community answer, the last time I checked, was AvaloniaUI (https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia) which is cross platform port of WPF (at least XAML based). ILSpy is already ported to it (https://github.com/icsharpcode/AvaloniaILSpy) but it runs poorly on Linux & mac (I have experienced random crashes and other UI problems). I hope the project will do well and within a year or two we will also see a port of Paint.NET to it.
A cross-platform desktop/mobile GUI is coming on .NET 6 with .NET MAUI.
Make GIMP look like Photoshop - https://github.com/doctormo/GimpPs
Another more extensive guide on how to make GIMP look and behave like Photoshop - https://www.pcsteps.com/1566-make-gimp-look-work-like-photos...
I want to love Gimp, its interface and window layout is aesthetically pleasing to me for a pro-level graphics program.
But as a non-pro, I have to google how to do even simple stuff b/c it's not discoverable or obvious from the interface. Just the other day I had to google how to draw a circle around something in a digital photo, which is about the simplest operation you could want to do. You can't just circle something with the lasso/elliptical select tool, there's more to it.
I can't fault Gimp too hard, though, it's aiming for pro's and power users, which I'm not. Frequent Gimp users will quickly learn Gimp's ways of doing simple things, and then move on to the harder stuff.
Mac has Pixelmator and Windows and Mac have Affinity Photo as Photoshop alternative for some.
Pinta and Krita are close but they are both very buggy still.
The reason? Someone new to programming changed the author in the about box and published it on their website.
Well, the author sure showed those terrible plagiarizers by making the project non-free. (Meanwhile, it is as easy as ever to modify .NET applications without source access - see e.g. the numerous mods for Unity games.)