Paint.NET 4.3 is now available | Hacker News Reader

Paint.NET 4.3 is now available

blog.getpaint.net

139 pointsWalterSobchak79 comments

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.

> but totally gave up on GUI stuff.

A cross-platform desktop/mobile GUI is coming on .NET 6 with .NET MAUI.

MAUI won't make .NET 6 launch and has been delayed.

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.

Pixelmator is great, the closest thing to paint.net, an d it closes almost every possible demand of a casual user.

Thank you for the tip on Pixelmator, I took a look and like it so far. Buying good software is not “caving in”.

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.

> Gimp is getting more and more unintuitive nowadays

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...

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.

gimp's time is over. No one liked it as their first choice for the past 20 years with more competitions, it's not going to get any more market share.

Mac has Pixelmator and Windows and Mac have Affinity Photo as Photoshop alternative for some.

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!

You could try to have a go at it, https://clojure.org/about/clojureclr

I've been getting back to Windows for work lately, and Paint.NET is one of the things that I missed when I was on Linux.

Pinta is the Linux fork of Paint.NET and it's not quite as good, but good enough for quick edits.

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.

Here it doesn't crash as often but most times selecting a color doesn't work. And the ocasionay crash, of course.

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].

[1] https://launchpad.net/~pinta-maintainers/+archive/ubuntu/pin...

[2] https://www.pinta-project.com/releases/

[3] https://github.com/PintaProject

I am using Ubuntu, pop os to be exact. Thanks for the info, I'll give it a try.

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

Pinta is not a port. It uses GTK+ and cairo. Some code comes from Paint.NET but not all of it.

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.

Thanks for the clarification!

Crashes for me as well unfortunately, in such a measure that I stopped using it entirely.

Crashes, lot of bugs. It's not quite good at all, it's unusable.

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.

It's still buggy, but the latest Pinta (v1.7) is WAY less buggy that what you'll typically get from your os package manager.

The same goes for foobar2000 as well.

For me it's MusicBee, but the feeling is the same.

foobar2000 is what I use on Windows, but Audacious is what I use on Linux. Is that good enough?

There's DeaDBeeF, which aims to be its open-source clone.

https://deadbeef.sourceforge.io/

Works fine on Wine, FWIW. I've even seen Wine specific fixes mentioned in the patch notes for foobar2000.

This is the only program I still miss from Windows after switching to Linux.

Pinta and Krita are close but they are both very buggy still.

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.

From the link it appears to be available in the Microsoft store. If you're on Windows already, is that a problem?

Store version is $6.99

Exactly. We can support good software for less than the cost of eating out for lunch.

Yep and it auto updates from the windows store. This is one of the few free apps I pay for.

Which is what I gladly payed for.

Developers should be compensated for their work, just like any other professionals.

Use ninite.com!

I don't think I've ever installed it like that. It's on Ninite, as is GIMP and Krita (and Inkscape for Vector).

https://github.com/paintdotnet/release/releases/tag/v4.3

Is this still the case? Not going to reiterate my comment upthread here, but I can't reconcile it with what I currently see...

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.

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.

[1] https://twitter.com/rickbrewPDN

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...

Can you more specifically link, or hint to which tweet(s) discuss this?

Here's one: https://twitter.com/rickbrewpdn/status/1425657626520555521?s...

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.

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.

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.)

Since it's .NET 5 now, couldn't it maybe work on other OSes too?

Good program, but that website is really hard to read.

[deleted]

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...

I intentionally chose the store version to support the creator, and the convenience of having it on MS Store. Paint.NET is well-worth the money.

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.

_edit_

Example, every page used to look like that for years: https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/25741-fake-download-links-...

The getpaint.net site did USED TO be riddled with ads pretending to be download buttons.

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.

For those who yearn for simpler times:

https://github.com/1j01/jspaint

https://jspaint.app/

there is mtpaint http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/ not too "advanced" btw

200mb and 300 DLLs

What's up with windows desktop app development? is it really THAT bad?

https://i.imgur.com/pkPSq7k.png

Looks like a deployment issue to me: they basically deployed the entire .NET 5 framework with the app instead of relying on the system installed one.

Makes sense, that's the portable version. Would be reasonable to package that all together.

why would one need to install the .net 5 framework only just to paint? is this Java bis?

They should statically ship what the program needs, nothing less, nothing more

A bit hard, when plugins can use anything from .NET platform.

    $ sudo apt install gimp
    Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information... Done
    The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
      libnuget-core-cil
    Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it.
    The following additional packages will be installed:
      fonts-droid-fallback fonts-noto-mono fonts-urw-base35 ghostscript gimp-data i965-va-driver intel-media-va-driver libaacs0
      libamd2 libaom0 libavcodec58 libavformat58 libavutil56 libbabl-0.1-0 libbdplus0 libbluray2 libcamd2 libccolamd2 libcholmod3
      libchromaprint1 libcodec2-0.9 libcolamd2 libde265-0 libexiv2-27 libgegl-0.4-0 libgegl-common libgexiv2-2 libgfortran5
      libgimp2.0 libgme0 libgs9 libgs9-common libgsm1 libheif1 libigdgmm11 libijs-0.35 libilmbase24 libjbig2dec0 liblapack3
      libmetis5 libmng2 libmypaint-1.5-1 libmypaint-common libopenexr24 libopenmpt0 libpaper-utils libpaper1 libpoppler-glib8
      libpoppler97 libraw19 libsdl2-2.0-0 libshine3 libsnappy1v5 libssh-gcrypt-4 libsuitesparseconfig5 libswresample3 libswscale5
      libumfpack5 libva-drm2 libva-x11-2 libva2 libvdpau1 libwebpmux3 libwmf0.2-7 libx264-155 libx265-179 libxvidcore4
      libzvbi-common libzvbi0 mesa-va-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers ocl-icd-libopencl1 poppler-data va-driver-all vdpau-driver-all
    Suggested packages:
      fonts-noto fonts-freefont-otf | fonts-freefont-ttf fonts-texgyre ghostscript-x gimp-help-en | gimp-help gimp-data-extras
      gvfs-backends i965-va-driver-shaders libbluray-bdj exiv2 libwmf0.2-7-gtk opencl-icd poppler-utils fonts-japanese-mincho
      | fonts-ipafont-mincho fonts-japanese-gothic | fonts-ipafont-gothic fonts-arphic-ukai fonts-arphic-uming fonts-nanum
      libvdpau-va-gl1 nvidia-vdpau-driver nvidia-legacy-340xx-vdpau-driver nvidia-legacy-304xx-vdpau-driver
    The following NEW packages will be installed:
      fonts-droid-fallback fonts-noto-mono fonts-urw-base35 ghostscript gimp gimp-data i965-va-driver intel-media-va-driver libaacs0
      libamd2 libaom0 libavcodec58 libavformat58 libavutil56 libbabl-0.1-0 libbdplus0 libbluray2 libcamd2 libccolamd2 libcholmod3
      libchromaprint1 libcodec2-0.9 libcolamd2 libde265-0 libexiv2-27 libgegl-0.4-0 libgegl-common libgexiv2-2 libgfortran5
      libgimp2.0 libgme0 libgs9 libgs9-common libgsm1 libheif1 libigdgmm11 libijs-0.35 libilmbase24 libjbig2dec0 liblapack3
      libmetis5 libmng2 libmypaint-1.5-1 libmypaint-common libopenexr24 libopenmpt0 libpaper-utils libpaper1 libpoppler-glib8
      libpoppler97 libraw19 libsdl2-2.0-0 libshine3 libsnappy1v5 libssh-gcrypt-4 libsuitesparseconfig5 libswresample3 libswscale5
      libumfpack5 libva-drm2 libva-x11-2 libva2 libvdpau1 libwebpmux3 libwmf0.2-7 libx264-155 libx265-179 libxvidcore4
      libzvbi-common libzvbi0 mesa-va-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers ocl-icd-libopencl1 poppler-data va-driver-all vdpau-driver-all
    0 upgraded, 76 newly installed, 0 to remove and 10 not upgraded.
    Need to get 61.7 MB of archives.
    After this operation, 320 MB of additional disk space will be used.
    Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

you include asian fonts + gpu driver, not a fair comparison

at least it's a native program, even if it's as bloated at paint.net

Asian fonts are suggested packages which aren't installed by default and not included in the 76 newly installed ones.

What do you mean a native program? What makes Gimp a native program for Linux but doesn't make Paint.NET native for Windows?

To be fair, GIMP is a much more featureful program than Paint.NET.

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.

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