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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

Paint.net is the one thing I missed when I switched from Windows to Mac when M1 came out.

It's a brilliant quick photo editor.

People say to use Pinta on Mac but it's not the same. The closest I've found is Pixelmator Pro, which is also awesome, but is not free and quite a bit heavier than Paint.net.

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Paint.Net is by far the best non-pro graphics editor ever. So practical and intuitive. To me lack of Paint.Net seems the biggest problem of desktop Linux, also of Mac. Sadly Pinta appears buggy. But it still is tolerable and has no real alternative. Both Photoshop and GIMP feel too unintuitive and this way take too much time to do simple things when you are not a graphics pro. GIMP also arguably looks ugly. Paint.Net is a great example of the whole UX (intuitiveness, convenience and aesthetics) done right.

As I understand Paint.Net it is a WPF app. I wish the author would just use Avalonia XPF to port it to Linux and Mac. XPF is a drop-in replacement for WPF which can easily make WPF apps cross-platform for some money. I wouldn't mind paying my share.

Yup, Paint.NET was the thing I mourned the most switching from Windows to Linux... still do. I'm somewhat surprised that there hasn't been more of an effort to get it working on Wine. I figure there's some context I'm missing, but still. It just seems odd that so many games have been made to work, but Paint.NET is sitting with a listed rank of "Garbage".

This is a vague memory so I might be wrong, but I think it's WinForms, not WPF, and it makes calls into Windows directly using P/Invoke so it's not trivially portable.

Both WPF and WinForms, additionally at least DirectWrite and Direct2D and by now a bunch of shader code for the various effects. I guess there's a lot of things that can go wrong when trying to run it via Wine.

Many quality Mac apps are not free. Fair enough IMO, then we know the developer gets some income for their work and hopefully stay motivated to refine the application.

My favourite in this category is Flying Meat’s Acorn. Really nice.

I am not sure how it compares to recent versions of Paint.NET, but on my Apple desktop computer, I like to use Aseprite [0] (which is also not free). At the very least, Aseprite seems to have more features compared to the Paint.NET version that came with my Windows 10 installation (I think).

It's more of a graphic program for game design, but still very good in my opinion. And multiplatform, so usable on Windows and Linux as well.

---

[0]: https://www.aseprite.org/

Aseprite is free if you compile it yourself [0], and can still be used for commercial purposes if compiled this way [1]. But I recommend buying it anyway to support the project.

[0]: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/

[1]: https://www.aseprite.org/faq/#can-i-sell-graphics-created-wi...

That was a no brainer. Great piece of software at an insanely low price.

yes, and it's the same for foobar2000

some software can't be replaced and don't have good enough alternatives, and prevent me from switch to linux

windows is getting worse, but not bad enough to justify me switching to linux, exactly because of those softwares

it's odd in a way, because the free software for windows is generally higher in quality that the one I find on linux.

And Gimp will never replace paint.net. Inkscape also have a very difficult UI.

This is from when I was using Linux full-time around 2010, but I was a foobar2000 user on Windows and wound up using Quod Libet as the best Linux-side replacement for it I could find. It wasn't a perfect substitute, but it worked for my needs.

(Some searching suggests that DeaDBeeF might be an even closer match these days, but it was brand new and I didn't hear about it back then.)

I'd agree with Gimp - it's UI makes several departures from other similar software.

But Inkscape's UI seems pretty intuitive?

Inkscape certainly has some idiosyncracies in its UI, but yeah, for the most part it's very reasonable and mostly adheres to common UI/UX conventions. Not sure how much it deviates from, say, Illustrator, as I haven't used the latter.

I agree that Paint.NET and Foobar2k are the two things I miss when I moved away from Windows. Amarok is a nice iTunes replacement for Linux, but it's no Foobar.

People use foorbar in different ways, but when I moved (foorbar works well in Wine btw), I discovered that Quodlibet is actually a better version of what I was using foobar for.

foobar2000 for Mac now exists. It's relatively recent, I think, and only supports a few plugins.

https://www.foobar2000.org/mac

The tooling back then was so good for windows desktop though. Before the recent mess. It enabled a lot of really nice apps. Good example of what great dev support can do for a platform.

Pixelmator Pro is not free, but it's pretty affordable and pretty amazing, and it's not subscription based.

I switched over to pixlr web apps and I love them - definitely recommend checking them out. I pay for premium (like $3/mo maybe) purely because I want to support them, not for the features.

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