Paint.NET is one of the first things I get when I install windows somewhere. It's actually pretty frustrating that there isn't a nice simple image editing tool like that for Mac (or Linux). There's Gimp but...
My understanding is that it's bits of the GIMP processing engine with a nicer UI.
Paint.NET is a great option on Windows for quick and easy graphic work, has been enough to keep me off Photoshop (as a web dev) for years.
Then there is http://pinta-project.com/, that was created basically as a cross-platform clone of paint.net
Apart from that, if you want a painting tool, Krita is reasonably good.
I'm not sure there's a similar project for Linux.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-open-source...
Yeah. Gimp doesn't really cut it in my books.
I'd love to get paint.net running in Linux under Wine, but so far all my attempts have failed.
It also doesn't help that I'm already well used to the paint.net/photoshop keyboard shortcuts. Besides Gimp having its own, different keyboard shortcuts, it also has some unique (and again different) conventions for how to use the mouse to select regions and stuff like that.
It may be equally productive once you're used to it, but I never liked Gimp enough to get into how the different ways it has chosen to do things actually works.
That's sad because you could be much more efficient with it.
None of the substitute photo viewer type apps on Linux really seem to stand in particularly well either - I like Shotwell at the moment, but it still lacks an easy to use crop/copy/paste workflow.
Don't get it actually, as it a native code application coded mostly in C, unless Python and Guile plugins now own the majority of the code.
That’s probably more than enough for people who don’t actually create any images. Maybe the photo editing is a bit anaemic, but Photoshop’s photo editing tools are cryptic and hard to use for occasional users and those probably benefit a lot more from a simple editing panel with a few relevant sliders than from all the hard to unlock power of Photoshop.
The only notable absent thing is some sort of image straightening tool (only 90° rotations are possible).
If you want to do actual image editing there are a couple of excellent apps, namely Acorn and Pixelmator, both modern and frequently updated. You have to pay for them but that’s Mac software. You should have to pay for them. That’s only proper.
Edit: The Internets claim that ported paint.net 3 exists as paint.mono. Not version 4 though :(
GIMP doesn't take that long to start now, though. I missed Paint.NET a lot more when the GIMP took longer to load.
I'd have to have another look to refresh my memory, and it was only a brief need, but might be worth having a look.
P.S. And of course, for vector graphics, "Inkscape".
And, oops: I see now that someone else mentioned Pinta already.
http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/whats-new-in-gimp-2-10
(I admit, GIMP 2.10 isn't technically out yet, but it is just around the corner.)
On OS X it is either Acorn (my preferred tool, because you can cut/paste excel spreadsheets into it elegantly), or Pixelmator (which I also use occasionally)