Paint.net used to be an open source collaboration project by Rick Brewster, a Microsoft Employee and the students at the University of Washington. Today it is a private closed source project accepting donations, and still headed by Rick Brewster.
I guess more digital art options on Linux are always good, but that aside, is there even a good reason to use it when something like Krita exists? It's always worked flawlessly on my linux machine (Mint).
Very different software. Paint.NET is mostly a composition/annotation tool oriented towards simplicity and speed, Krita revolves around digital painting.
I never did any digital painting in Krita, I use it only for basic image editing and it can do all I wanted to do with Paint.net. Should I care that an app can do more than what I use it for, if it stays out of the way?
I can see that. I wish Pixelmator (before it got bought up by Apple) had been ported over to Linux. That's been the closest lightweight super-intuitive alternative to Paint.net I've ever messed around with.
Paint.net is my go-to image editing software. I'm not a digital artist or professional photographer, I just need to downsize/crop/adjust the occasional image. I don't need the kitchen sink. Regular MS Paint is annoyingly basic and Krita, GIMP, et al., are too much UI-wise. That said, I use Linux daily but not for images so not sure if there is a Paint.net analog on Linux already.
The full thread[0] about how it runs on Wine is quite interesting:
> Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that it uses on WINE (triggered by using /wine). It lives in PaintDotNet.Windows.Direct2D1.Managed.dll. This was written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible and would NEVER have happened.
> Most of this code is, as they say, "vibe coded." By that I mean that it has not been thoroughly reviewed, it's more "trust me bro" style. I cannot possibly review 180,000 lines of code, it's just way way way too much. For reference, the rest of Paint.NET is about 700,000 lines of code and I've been working on it for over 20 years. I did thoroughly review any code that had to be changed or added elsewhere in the Paint.NET code base (refactoring and integration points, etc.). Over time I do hope that more of this code will be vetted by real humans and also by more advanced AI models.
I'm not the Paint.NET developer (just a happy user of that software), but to me the moral logic would go something like this:
If Anthropic can absorb proprietary or GPL code into their models, which they rent usage of for tens of billions of dollars in revenue, and successfully claim that this violates no licenses, then I can also consider the output of those models "clean" for purposes of my software I give away for free.
Direct2D has some complex algorithms because it was designed for high-quality antialiased rasterization on DX9-class hardware, particularly tesselation, and suitable not only for vector graphics but also text glyphs. This bleeds over into the API, which is quite complex and somewhat annoying at times. It revives the GDI-style interface of needing to create and select a solid brush object instead of just passing a color, and drawing text with colored spans is embarrassingly involved (it involves writing a custom rendering bridge between Direct2D and DirectWrite).
The other problem is that Wine has only implemented a minimal amount of the Direct2D API to get specific programs working that aren't heavy graphics programs. Two major omissions, the last time I looked, were that Wine's implementation does not support antialiasing at all, and its ArcTo() draws a line.
I see they finally got the domain name paint.net. They used to be at getpaint.net, and the paint company that owned paint.net had a link saying something like 'if you are looking for the graphics software, go to getpaint.net'.
The previous owner of the Paint.net domain erred in hosting information regarding Paint.NET, which was evidently misleading enough to win dotPDN LLC a domain squatting suit.
> The previous owner of the Paint.net domain erred in hosting information regarding Paint.NET
The ones who had displayed link to getpaint.net was a legitimate paint company.
Some time after 2012, the domain name was later acquired by another entity (owned by a "domain investor"), which turned the website into an imitation of getpaint.net in 2025, allowing the developer to file a successful lawsuit.
I don't see the issue. The thing I can't move past with generative AI is that it wouldn't exist without the labour of people who post things for free on the internet, but it's displacing those same people from their day jobs. Legal or not, I think having your own work used against your will to harm you is something to be justifiably angry about.
And many pro-AI communities sweep the issue under the rug, consider it invalid in some way, or just over-discussed and boring. They have to, because it's uncomfortable and it has no solution. There is no generative AI without scraped datasets. But the consequence of ignoring the issue is that you might be surprised when you encounter a large group who are still very (justifiably) angry about it. Bluesky has a large community of people who post art for free on the internet.
You can't expect them to be civil either, when so many countries are in a cost of living crisis. No one faces losing their home or health insurance and thinks "I'd better be polite to the people doing it," and a high profile developer posting publicly about implementing a long-asked-for feature with AI is exactly what the AI marketing machine needs. A lot of devs are wondering whether AI-generated code is good or slop, and it's the opinion of other respected devs that sways them.
Also, let's not forget that PDN isn't FOSS. Linux platform knowledge was scraped from FOSS Linux software, trained into AI, and is being used to port a closed source program to Linux where it will displace FOSS alternatives. And the dev expects a pat on the back from the community? Why?
It looks like the original post was removed, but there are some screenshots going around (unfortunately X doesn't let you view full-size unless you're logged in): https://x.com/ChrisCroy/status/2094867317163540937
I honestly suspect that if he said he was using OpenAI instead, the results would be completely different. Ever since the DOD thing, pretty much every sub, thread, or reference to Claude, has resulted in vitriol. It mostly materializes as one-line comments and harassment.
What I noticed in this is that literally every single poster has a cartoon avatar. I assume they farm their karma in threads related to a game, movie, show, etc.
I don't frequently downvote but you deserve one. I cannot see the racial slur, other posters cannot either; you know the story about the boy who cried wolf, you're doing exactly as that boy and therefore you are unhelpful your cause!
The irony is as well, I would almost be willing to bet almost every single one neither uses paint.net nor linux, and that these changes would have literally zero impact on them whatsoever.
Paint.net is just one of those freeware apps that became a sorta figment of retro identity for some people, akin to winamp. Even if they havent touched it in over a decade, they feel entitled to become vengeful for their nostalgia being "tainted".
Outside of tech communities like HN, I see anti-AI rhetoric everywhere. A very large number of humans see AI as a purely evil and parasitic thing, no matter how it’s used. It’s an especially common view among artists and young people.
Whether or not you agree about AI, when you’re communicating to a wider audience, you have to read the room.
Yeah, Bluesky is pretty much singlemindedly focused on hating AI at this point. It's odd. Sort of feels like it's becoming a sanctuary (though definitely not a healthy one) for people who just can't deal with the post-2020 world - a lot of yelling about people who don't mask up, who dare to use AI, etc.
I constantly hear this refrain, but almost everyone I know is insufferably pro-AI. I myself am neutral to skeptical, I think it’s overhyped and only semi-useful (to me personally) but not the end of humanity.
> Al haters are basically a very small minority and almost all of them are online. It isn't a large number.
Without even getting into the AI part of this claim, how can you have any confidence about a claim like this when there are always going to be several orders of magnitude more people who are online than people you interact with offline? You could replace "AI haters" with "people who live in <continent I don't live in>" and end up with something that's pretty much entirely true in your subjective experience but quite obviously false objectively. How do you tell what's your bubble and what's actually what most people think?
I do think it is worth questioning why an entire thread is filled specifically and exclusively with cartoon character avatars. Pick a thread, pretty much any thread on bsky with 20+ replies and I believe you'll have trouble reproducing these results. I have had trouble finding one.
Feel free to locate some and point them out to me. Let me know how many threads it took you to find one. I am genuinely curious.
The backlash is so completely unwarranted. This is a piece of free software where the creator is making it easier to use on free software platforms. If you don't want PDN on Linux because you hate AI no matter what, then don't use it. Don't rage attack the creator so that others can't use PDN.
Thanks Rick Brewster! I love PDN. It isn't as capable as Photoshop, but it isn't a rental, and it does 99% of what I need it to do. I've even bought it on the Microsoft Store just to support it.
At the risk of opening up the usual can of worms, I feel like the terminology "free software platform" is not something I've seen used in the sense that you're describing paint.net as "free". I genuinely got confused the first time I read your comment because referring to Linux as "free software platforms" made me assume that you meant the other type of free, which paint.net is not.
English only has "free". PDN is gratis, free as in beer. While the free software platforms (WINE, Linux) are libre, free as in speech.
I still think the argument holds though that people who have maybe used PDN but haven't contributed time, code, money, or even bug reports have no business raging at its author because he used AI to make it run on WINE/Linux. Literal ingrates.
It's not clear to me what argument you thought I was making. To reiterate, I was saying that I had never heard someone say "free software platform" and not mean "libre", so I found it a bit odd to refer to paint.net supporting Linux as "free software on free software platforms". You're welcome to disagree with me, but I'm struggling to understand how you came to the conclusion that I was not aware of free as in beer versus freedom based on what I wrote.
I wasn't disagreeing. I even upvoted your comment. I was just clarifying which kinds of free I was intending. Your previous comment said that PDN is not "the other type of free" without defining or clarifying what kind of free "the other type" is.
There’s nothing surprising about Bluesky’s audience being toxic to any mention of AI. It’s the dogma over there and anyone who doesn’t agree has long left or never joined.
> It’s the dogma over there and anyone who doesn’t agree has long left or never joined.
Tell me you aren't on literally any other social media site without telling me.
Even HN has it's fair share of anti-ai criticism.
The only place that might not be like that also doubles as a child porn factory. I'll take anti-AI bias over visiting a pedo paradise any day of the week.
I have tried to use Pinta at several independent points in time over the past 10+ years, and every time I have tried it, it has been so buggy as to be practically unusable.
It's a shame. It would be the perfect application for my basic image editing needs, if only I could actually rely on it to work.
These days, I just use Krita. It's on the heavier side, but functionally, it does what I need.
Miguel de Icaza took that code and got it running on Mono back in the day, and a few months ago for kicks I compiled it and it still runs. Quite buggy though.
paint.net is amazing for basic png editing, I've dreamed of this day. It'a the only thing I miss from Windows. I don't understand the slashback at all.
It says something that an old paint.net derivative is still the best general purpose image editor out there. (I consider GIMP harder and slower to use.)
Krita is what I use. Pinta just had a lot of broken UX and it didn't behave the way I expected. Krita is closer to Photoshop, but having extra features is not a problem. I'm pretty sure anything you'd do in paint.net you can do in Krita.
I think it's roughly possible for any piece of software. I think the problem would be how long it would take to polish it afterwards. I think it would be an interesting experiment to run an AI only open source project though. Not sure cloning another paint program is really worth the effort however.
It's nice to have more options, so far I've managed to handle most of my Linux graphics needs with https://www.photopea.com - amazing broad support of document image formats, full-featured edits and all running in the browser.
I know nothing about writing an image editor or graphics programming but maybe someone here can fill me in - would it be more or less difficult ("would it take more or less tokens" is probably the right question to ask these days) to replace the Windows-specific APIs with cross-platform alternatives (I guess Skia instead of Direct2D and something like Avalonia or Uno instead of Win32-based UI?) instead of re-implementing Direct2D?
However, I think without having the burden of legacy code and APIs it is a bit easier to accomplish. Probably paint.net has been targeting Windows platforms from the beginning and making it "Linux compatible" has not been a big effort but more a side effect of fixing some stuff and wine generally being awesome.
I personally would love to see commercial editors like Affinity Studio targeting Linux. While solutions like Krita and Gimp are great, it did not really click for me. I'm using Gimp, but somehow I often find myself seeking for how to do easy tasks that should be more intuitive.
For an image editor with layers and the like, I think skia and avalonia and the like are too high level, you'll never get the same performance and possibly not close to the same functionality unless you implement GPU stuff yourself that Direct2D does for you.
This seems fun. I like Paint.net. Will try it out when its finished. I understand the backlash against LLM stuff and have my own reasons for not liking it that much. If its disclosed though, I don't mind. The rest of this comment is claude wondering why I have not run into that much LLM assisted software and games.
I've been trying to find at least partially LLM made software, software features, and games to try that's not a chatbot/agent/harness/mcp server for well over a year now. So far I'm up to one library, one piece of software (Trilium Notes), and zero games I'm using on a weekly basis. I almost had a file browser, but they stopped working on it and it was not working well with Windows DPI scaling. Found one okay song, but it had that cheap LLM feeling. I do see a lot of LLM generated memes of influencers. I keep thinking I should be finding lots of software and games to try out. Ports, clones in various languages, decomplications, feature additions from people that did not have enough time to work on them by hand, that sort of thing.
Only four out of 50ish games on my wishlist (mostly small teams or solo devs) have AI disclosures. AI seems to be used most often for texture and icon placeholders, voice acting (sometimes to be redone with real actors), translations, icons, and signs in-game. Two games had to state that they are using other systems besides LLMs for their AI features.
When I do find projects, I still run into the same pain points I did as before. Namely being too slow to load, DPI scaling issues, general errors so the software does not run, and most often the instructions as listed don't work but you can still get the software to run if ask the LLM that generated the software how to run it because the instructions LLM generated did not work for you. I'm assuming there is a lot of AI stuff going on the in background and backends of SaaS products and websites I use but who knows.
Oh god YES!
I paid for paint.net on Windows because it's the only software I find reasonably simple AND reasonably advanced, covering all my usage.
The lack of a linux version was a huge disappointment, especially since most of my computers are switching to windows (I have 2 more on windows and was evaluating moving one of the two over!)
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 16.0 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/kde/krita
It’s lighter, simpler, and faster with a much more intuitive UX. for basic image manipulation tasks it’s awesome.
For creation of art I’d use Krita, it is more feature complete. But if Paint.NET appeared on Linux, I’d use it in a heartbeat.
Paint.NET is closer to Gimp, but usable.
Paint.net is the only thing I miss from my days on Windows machines, so super excited about this!
> Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that it uses on WINE (triggered by using /wine). It lives in PaintDotNet.Windows.Direct2D1.Managed.dll. This was written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible and would NEVER have happened.
> Most of this code is, as they say, "vibe coded." By that I mean that it has not been thoroughly reviewed, it's more "trust me bro" style. I cannot possibly review 180,000 lines of code, it's just way way way too much. For reference, the rest of Paint.NET is about 700,000 lines of code and I've been working on it for over 20 years. I did thoroughly review any code that had to be changed or added elsewhere in the Paint.NET code base (refactoring and integration points, etc.). Over time I do hope that more of this code will be vetted by real humans and also by more advanced AI models.
[0]: https://forums.paint.net/topic/134563-%F0%9F%8D%B7-extremely...
If Anthropic can absorb proprietary or GPL code into their models, which they rent usage of for tens of billions of dollars in revenue, and successfully claim that this violates no licenses, then I can also consider the output of those models "clean" for purposes of my software I give away for free.
The other problem is that Wine has only implemented a minimal amount of the Direct2D API to get specific programs working that aren't heavy graphics programs. Two major omissions, the last time I looked, were that Wine's implementation does not support antialiasing at all, and its ArcTo() draws a line.
The ones who had displayed link to getpaint.net was a legitimate paint company.
Some time after 2012, the domain name was later acquired by another entity (owned by a "domain investor"), which turned the website into an imitation of getpaint.net in 2025, allowing the developer to file a successful lawsuit.
https://alldomains.app/paint-net-after-22-years-software-dev...
If you were expecting reasonable debate, that's not the place.
And many pro-AI communities sweep the issue under the rug, consider it invalid in some way, or just over-discussed and boring. They have to, because it's uncomfortable and it has no solution. There is no generative AI without scraped datasets. But the consequence of ignoring the issue is that you might be surprised when you encounter a large group who are still very (justifiably) angry about it. Bluesky has a large community of people who post art for free on the internet.
You can't expect them to be civil either, when so many countries are in a cost of living crisis. No one faces losing their home or health insurance and thinks "I'd better be polite to the people doing it," and a high profile developer posting publicly about implementing a long-asked-for feature with AI is exactly what the AI marketing machine needs. A lot of devs are wondering whether AI-generated code is good or slop, and it's the opinion of other respected devs that sways them.
Also, let's not forget that PDN isn't FOSS. Linux platform knowledge was scraped from FOSS Linux software, trained into AI, and is being used to port a closed source program to Linux where it will displace FOSS alternatives. And the dev expects a pat on the back from the community? Why?
What I noticed in this is that literally every single poster has a cartoon avatar. I assume they farm their karma in threads related to a game, movie, show, etc.
Paint.net is just one of those freeware apps that became a sorta figment of retro identity for some people, akin to winamp. Even if they havent touched it in over a decade, they feel entitled to become vengeful for their nostalgia being "tainted".
Outside of tech communities like HN, I see anti-AI rhetoric everywhere. A very large number of humans see AI as a purely evil and parasitic thing, no matter how it’s used. It’s an especially common view among artists and young people.
Whether or not you agree about AI, when you’re communicating to a wider audience, you have to read the room.
There is plenty of skepticism (with any new technology) sure. People often change their attitude to technology when they can see utility in it.
> Whether or not you agree about AI, when you’re communicating to a wider audience, you have to read the room.
People quite frankly were being arseholes. The AI-haters are as bad as the AI-cultists.
Without even getting into the AI part of this claim, how can you have any confidence about a claim like this when there are always going to be several orders of magnitude more people who are online than people you interact with offline? You could replace "AI haters" with "people who live in <continent I don't live in>" and end up with something that's pretty much entirely true in your subjective experience but quite obviously false objectively. How do you tell what's your bubble and what's actually what most people think?
I do think it is worth questioning why an entire thread is filled specifically and exclusively with cartoon character avatars. Pick a thread, pretty much any thread on bsky with 20+ replies and I believe you'll have trouble reproducing these results. I have had trouble finding one.
Feel free to locate some and point them out to me. Let me know how many threads it took you to find one. I am genuinely curious.
Thanks Rick Brewster! I love PDN. It isn't as capable as Photoshop, but it isn't a rental, and it does 99% of what I need it to do. I've even bought it on the Microsoft Store just to support it.
I still think the argument holds though that people who have maybe used PDN but haven't contributed time, code, money, or even bug reports have no business raging at its author because he used AI to make it run on WINE/Linux. Literal ingrates.
Tell me you aren't on literally any other social media site without telling me.
Even HN has it's fair share of anti-ai criticism.
The only place that might not be like that also doubles as a child porn factory. I'll take anti-AI bias over visiting a pedo paradise any day of the week.
Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux
https://web.archive.org/web/20080000000000*/http://www.dotpd...
It's a shame. It would be the perfect application for my basic image editing needs, if only I could actually rely on it to work.
These days, I just use Krita. It's on the heavier side, but functionally, it does what I need.
This is not a good release.
Don't support poorly made software. Use Gimp, Pinta, or Krita on Linux.
If you just want to use the thing, not recompile it, paint.net is still free, even for commercial work, and (in my opinion) has better UX.
Seems like the kind of software that with enough tokens an agent would be able to create from scratch autonomously.
I'd guess with 5 max subs running fable 5.1 almost non stop it should be doable in a couple of weeks.
[1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/rick-brewster/
So it needs Wine.
https://github.com/PixiEditor/PixiEditor
However, I think without having the burden of legacy code and APIs it is a bit easier to accomplish. Probably paint.net has been targeting Windows platforms from the beginning and making it "Linux compatible" has not been a big effort but more a side effect of fixing some stuff and wine generally being awesome.
I personally would love to see commercial editors like Affinity Studio targeting Linux. While solutions like Krita and Gimp are great, it did not really click for me. I'm using Gimp, but somehow I often find myself seeking for how to do easy tasks that should be more intuitive.
I've been trying to find at least partially LLM made software, software features, and games to try that's not a chatbot/agent/harness/mcp server for well over a year now. So far I'm up to one library, one piece of software (Trilium Notes), and zero games I'm using on a weekly basis. I almost had a file browser, but they stopped working on it and it was not working well with Windows DPI scaling. Found one okay song, but it had that cheap LLM feeling. I do see a lot of LLM generated memes of influencers. I keep thinking I should be finding lots of software and games to try out. Ports, clones in various languages, decomplications, feature additions from people that did not have enough time to work on them by hand, that sort of thing.
Only four out of 50ish games on my wishlist (mostly small teams or solo devs) have AI disclosures. AI seems to be used most often for texture and icon placeholders, voice acting (sometimes to be redone with real actors), translations, icons, and signs in-game. Two games had to state that they are using other systems besides LLMs for their AI features.
When I do find projects, I still run into the same pain points I did as before. Namely being too slow to load, DPI scaling issues, general errors so the software does not run, and most often the instructions as listed don't work but you can still get the software to run if ask the LLM that generated the software how to run it because the instructions LLM generated did not work for you. I'm assuming there is a lot of AI stuff going on the in background and backends of SaaS products and websites I use but who knows.
The lack of a linux version was a huge disappointment, especially since most of my computers are switching to windows (I have 2 more on windows and was evaluating moving one of the two over!)
I hope plugin makers are going to port them too