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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Pity that they don't open source it. I've gone through multiple image editors on Linux, and none of them have the simplicity of Paint. The layout and functionality is incredibly intuitive. You drop someone into Paint, and even if they've never seen it before, they can start doing stuff within a minute or so. You drop the same person into GIMP, and five minutes later they're still trying to figure out how the hell to select a paintbrush.

I understand that every image editor is trying to compete with Photoshop, but sometimes I don't need Photoshop. I just need to paste my clipboard so that I can crop, circle something, or annotate with some text and a crudely drawn arrow. There really is nothing else comparable that can do that as quickly or as easily as Paint.

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Reposting/editing my deeper comment. But if you want to specifically do screenshots, try Greenshot:

http://getgreenshot.org/ https://github.com/greenshot/greenshot/

It's open-source. The built-in image editor is optimized for the things that you need to do with screenshots - it is comparable, but almost in the wrong direction: Things are easier and quicker with Greenshot than Paint! Here's a quick guide I threw together:

https://i.imgur.com/tcpZjG0.png

Yes, it runs on Windows, but so does Paint. They have a Mac version (never tried it, apparently it was a near-complete rewrite), but not a Linux version: http://getgreenshot.org/faq/will-there-ever-be-a-greenshot-v...

I'd like to also chime in on how great Greenshot is. I started using Greenshot after Skitch got EOL'ed, and while it's not perfect, I find it indispensable for sharing screenshots with coworkers.

https://www.kde.org/applications/graphics/kolourpaint/

I think a few people (some non-KDE users) have an aversion to KDE/Qt tools and avoid them where possible. Certainly it was enough of a pain for me to get consistent look-and-feel across all my applications that I gave up and decided not to use Qt if I could avoid it.

I don't get it. On windows each app has a completely different look and feel and guidelines and people are fine with it.

But on Linux we have 2 and people are complaining.

Btw, GTK+ apps look very close to Qt apps on KDE as KDE's Breeze engine has a GTK+ version.

Additionally, an open source windows paint (that parent comment asked for) will not look consistent go GTK+ apps as well.

well people do complain, but i think the point is that windows has one UI framework (win32/user32) and (most) everyone uses that. It provides all of the primitives and norms that people expect

Do you actually use windows? That's not my experience at all. The difference between even just the stuff windows ships with is staggering. Just compare control panel to settings app, they look like they belong to different OS's, and you have to use both to access all configuration.

IME real users don't care about the app being aesthetically different, but they do care if the common idioms have changed(e.g. position of OK/Cancel). That shouldn't depend on your toolkit, though.

There are like 50 different toolkits...

I exagerate, but: win32 GDI, windows.forms, MFCs, ATL and that is just from microsoft off the top of my head. There are way more when you start looking at all the solutions that a typical user might actually have running on their machine.

MFC, ATL, and the .NET stuff with the exception of XAML all use win32 controls under the hood. XAML still uses user32 albeit not the control toolkit. Because everything shares the same common core things work together better than on Linux.

> MFC, ATL, and the .NET stuff with the exception of XAML all use win32 controls under the hood.

Oh, I wish that were true. I have twice been a test automation engineer and stopped exactly that not being true for all widgets. Some are, but many of them, including some styles of buttons are not. A simple heuristic to tell is that when a UI widget does something the win32 can't, its probably not a win32 widget.

Even using UI inspection tools like Spy++ panels with .Net buttons that aren't backed by win32 buttons just show don't show up as an item is the tree of UI elements. There are also applications that just do silly things like use GDI, DirectX or OpenGL to draw a thing that looks like a button and isn't controlable of adjustable via external calls at all.

I have found kde tools have much more functionality. Gtk based tools generally do a free things and do them well.

> I think a few people (some non-KDE users) have an aversion to KDE/Qt tools and avoid them where possible.

Why would you have an aversion to Kolourpaint but not to a Linux port of MS Paint? That does not make sense in the context of this thread - unless your comment was a non-sequitur.

Edit: After rereading, I have realized the root of the thread can be interpreted in other ways than what I got - I felt AdmiralAsshat's main thrust was they'd have wanted a Linux port of MS Paint.

Thanks, I'll give it a look.

I'm a little hesitant about grabbing a KDE app on my Cinnamon desktop, as it will inevitably result in pulling down like 50 KDE libraries. But we'll see.

perhaps use

    apt-get kolourpaint --no-install-recommends

or similar?

Warning: I have not tried this, but it might cut down the KDE library count (e.g. just why does Krita need a phonon back end dependency?)

An identical open source Paint re-implementation is available on ReactOS, the free open Windows re-implementation: http://www.ReactOS.org

You can download it from the package manager, and use it on Windows or Wine too. (Maybe WineHQ ships it as well)

How stable is ReactOS, and does it have a fairly good set of features for a desktop OS? Had read about it earlier, never tried it out.

ReactOS may have its issues, but the (Ms)Paint implementation in ReactOS that frik is talking about is pretty stable. And open-source: https://svn.reactos.org/svn/reactos/trunk/reactos/base/appli...

Good to know ...

For those who remember the Amiga's Deluxe Paint, there's this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrafX2

I was about to suggest XPaint as being equally simple, but it might be more complex than I thought:

> Recent versions have support for advanced image manipulations (image zooming and resizing, filters, color modifications, separation of RGB channels), scripting, layers, edition of alpha channel and of transparent images, vector formats import, truetype fonts and anti-aliasing, geometric transformations of such fonts, etc. …

> The scripting capabilities include programmable filters, batch processing, creation of 2D and 3D images, etc. XPaint also recently acquired a built-in editor which can be used to produce posters containing text and images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPaint

XPaint used to be decent, but at some point it got really buggy. You have to save after every operation in case it crashes. Someone ought to go to town on it with valgrind or whatever.

> I just need to paste my clipboard so that I can crop, circle something, or annotate with some text and a crudely drawn arrow. There really is nothing else comparable that can do that as quickly or as easily as Paint.

I use Greenshot for this use case. It's faster than Paint at everything you mentioned, better at screenshots, has some nice tools like highlight and obfuscate, and one-click export/upload for a bunch of services (eg to Imgur).

> I've gone through multiple image editors on Linux, and none of them have the simplicity of Paint

Have you tried mypaint?

I loved MyPaint on the Nokia N900, with the pressure sensitive screen and the built in stylus

Yeah, ugly as hell.

These basic image highlighting features are so useful that Apple made them available in the Mail app (https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht204093).

If you've gone through so many image editors on Linux, why would you choose GIMP to compare it to? That's the prime example of an image editor that aims to be like Photoshop. Just about any other image editor on Linux is easier to use.

Pinta is pretty close to paint on linux but yeah, "it's not paint"

You may also try Krita - I think it's pretty well done.

What you're saying you use mspaint for i use greenshot and it is much better, while still being tiny and lightweight.

Pinta has always been my simple go to image editor on linux. Similar to Paint.NET

I just wanted to add that Pinta 1.6 (which is the current stable version in the official Arch repos, for example) has awfully slow rectangle/selection tools on larger images. In my case, selecting something in a 2000x2000 image would freeze the whole program for a couple of seconds. Same with resizing or dragging a selection. It was pretty much useless.

But 1.7 fixes this issue. It's a development version and not considered "stable" yet (though I haven't experienced any issues so far).

There is a tool called windows ink that lets you do pretty much that

It doesn't though, it takes a screengrab of your current window and let's you annotate, but only if it's a win32 app or UWP not the win8 apps. I just ran into this issue last night (to be fair snipping also doesn't work).

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