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 a link to getpaint.net was a legitimate paint company.
Some time after 2012, the domain name was acquired by another entity (associated with a "domain investor"), which allegedly turned the website into an imitation of getpaint.net in 2025, allowing the developer to file a successful lawsuit based on trademark infringement.
Which is what, exactly? As far as I can tell, it seems more about what he wants to not allow. At the end of the day I respect an author's choice whether to close source to something even if I disagree with it, but it feels a little euphemistic to describe that as "allowing" something.
Paint.Net was only really open source entirely from 2004-2007 and partially from 2007-2009 (engine only, not the UI for the latter part).
My experience: Pinta is an inferior Paint.NET . It's about the same level of complexity, but everything is just like... 60-85% as good.
Krita is a heavier program, but has a similar level of polish. You might not use half the features, but Krita's what I'd suggest for anyone wanting an open source alternative to Paint.net
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.
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.)
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.
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
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?
Because the most vocal people are always a minority and I can use my own good judgement.
I am also not in any "bubble" group and I am one of those people that are very suspicious of cliques.
I spent as much time talking to people that are neutral, positive and negative on AI.
Most of the AI haters IME of interacting with them irrational and are full of very poor arguments for their position. Almost all of it is emotional and/or out of ignorance. I've seen the exact same arguments made on US and UK based websites.
A lot of AI-skepticism I've encountered IRL/more-normie space comes from fears of what their children will do for work and the large data centre projects being approved by government without enough consultation of local residents. I think these are both valid concerns.
I think you might be misunderstanding what I mean by the word "bubble". It's quite literally impossible to talk to a representative sample of people the size of the internet, so judging purely by people you've interacted with is to me by definition a bubble. The fact that you claim to have sought out conversations with a variety of viewpoints but someone are of the opinion that the people online can't possibly represent a substantial group or are worth taking seriously rather than maybe just people you haven't talked to directly is a bit hard not to be skeptical of.
You seem to be under the impression that I’m only talking to a small group of people. I’m talking about conversing on forums and Discord, reading different news articles, watching different media, and hearing it discussed by people who are both IT/software professionals and people who work in other fields. I am deliberately avoiding taking my information from a clique or a bubble, as I’ve already explained.
Moreover, I personally find this sort of discussion point / tactic to be very frustrating. It essentially stops any form of discussion, doesn't provide me or anyone else new information and doesn't really point anything out that is incorrect with my rationale than it isn't statistically sound when I wasn't pretending it was. I've factored that into my thought process and I am open to changing my mind.
My rationale is relatively simple:
- It is known that the most vocal/extreme people (on any side of any issues) are a minority, there is nothing controversial with this statement.
- It is also known that there is a technological adoption curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle) which is basically a bell curve. This model is well known and I don't think there is much that is controversial with the basic premise of it.
- When anything that is pushed too much and AI has been hyped massively, there will be a reaction and people will push back.
I can then use this knowledge and then apply it to what I am seeing online and IRL and then form my opinion, which I have already stated.
Now I understand that some people can get drawn into cliques and "bubbles" where they only see information that confirms their own confirmation bias. That is why I bothered listening to people that hold opposite opinions to my own.
I've found many of the arguments to simply be poor including people that many people laud like Ed Zitron (you may have seen there was a blog post by Danluu saying he has been consistently wrong that was on this site a few days ago). I also think that they are essentially in their own bubble.
So this idea that I (or anyone else) cannot be cautiously skeptical and attempt a level headed assessment of sentiment based on what I am seeing online and IRL because it isn't rigorously statistically sound is a nonsense and just derails any discussions into where I having to defend what is a relatively normal (albeit informal) decision making process.
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.
My guess is they are hobby artists who think that AI and piracy are the only things preventing them from making it big. There’s more of these out there than you would think.
If you look at the quality of their avatars it becomes clear why they aren’t making money as artists.
I didn't quite want to say it myself since I've been so negative sometimes lately. But it was something I noticed and picking a random profile to view was pretty stomach turning.
But I get there is backlash. Not everyone lives in the bubble HN does. Not even everyone here is accepting of AI. I don't even know where I stand many times. But something feels off about this response. It's certainly looking brigaded.
On my home feed was another AI announcement. Few comments. Zero hate. And I definitely expected more there.
Paint.NET is (partially) art software. The art community has a negative view of AI. Therefore announcements of AI use in Paint.NET get a negative reaction, more so than something like AI startup #491000
I see your point, but I always got the impression that Paint.NET was a barebones image/photo editor for power users. Typically something full featured like Photoshop, Krita, or Illustrator would be more in the art software camp, IMHO.
A basic AM/FM radio does receive radio, but you wouldn’t lump it in with a Yaesu or even a Baofeng.
I’m just surprised to see so many strong opinions from people who probably don’t even use the software (although they pretend they do).
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!
Sure - they even unselfishly share all their noises with as much people as possible. As much as the engine can produce (i.e. better be a rich biker, then you can make your engine share a lot more or it).
Just FYI, Honda Goldwing (the archetypal Huge Luxurious Expensive 1800cc Motorcycle For Your Mid-Life Crisis) has about the same noise level as any ordinary car. I had one for years. Please don't lump everyone up under "they", you only notice the loud ones.
Then you are not a "biker". You just ride a motorcycle. (The most major) Part of being a biker is to disrupt with noise. Or why do the machines (typically) get louder and louder with the price tag? Because technology doesn't know a way to do better? Sure... Vote me down, but don't ask me to be naive. The major part of that hobby is to be unpleasantly loud in public spaces (the more people around the better).
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.
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".
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?
Bluesky is pretty decent and has features that I like over X, but much of its user base are from the Great Xodus (pardon the pun): people who frame their switch to Bluesky as some kind of boycott of X, ie, a bunch of moralists. They didn't leave X because it's a hellscape of trashing and toxicity, no, they left because the politics changed. And so Bluesky is now saturated with people who are very opinionated, very loud about it, and very willing to engage in trashing.
Nah, Twitter is still absolutely rotten with toxicity. The Great Xodus happened due to the rapid chuddification of Twitter under its new management: it was over politics, not toxicity. As such they brought the toxicity with them like a plague.
Bluesky has this nice feature where you can mute lists, so someone made a MAGA list (https://bsky.app/profile/skywatch.blue/lists/3l53cjwlt4o2s), and yet I was still seeing MAGA stuff on my feed because all the Twitter refugees were screenshotting Twitter nonsense and laundering it into my feed. Utterly ridiculous.
I find myself agreeing with this a lot, as well as the secondhand amplification many do. I get some want to brigade but often times that very action is what leads to all sorts of awful content coming upon social media feeds in general, because they simply have to show others how awful this thing they saw was.
Its not exclusive to bluesky by any margin, but it does become especially concerning as a double standard to filter lists.
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.
> Alright everyone, message received. I was not expecting this response, I honestly had no idea before I made the post
The source got deleted, what is the backlash even about? People don't like .net software running on Linux?
> Like I said, the code is experimental. A proof of concept showing that PDN-on-WINE is possible. It's not finished. I can literally just delete it. It won't be part of the next build.
This almost sounds like sarcasm and a reference to the whole "The Bun-rewritten-in-Rust branch is just a prototype and probably means nothing" Tweet that initially made the frontpage when it. But I think it's in earnest, just very similar to how I remember that Tweet I suppose.
>Paint .NET-on-WINE has never been possible because of Direct2D, which WINE has really struggled with (for good reasons).
>So like ... why not reimplement Direct2D-in-Paint .NET? Remove the dependency on WINE completely. Clean room reverse engineering ...
>Thanks to Claude Code, it's now a reality. More story in the link above.
>It's buggy and slow, but real progress is being made.
>And I have no idea when/if this will be "production ready" or "supported" or even "good enough." Maybe next year, maybe next month, maybe 2035.
>Claude made more progress on this in 3 weeks than we've seen in the 12 years since PDN started using Direct2D in 2014.
>This isn't to talk down to the WINE folks, btw. Direct2D has a really complicated effects system, and probably only PDN really uses it, so the ROI was very low.
>AI doesn't care. And it doesn't get tired. And this is the perfect task for it: it already has the design (D2D's docs and API), and it already has a known-good implementation of it and an app to test against and bang its head against.
>So that's what it did: it banged its head against d2d1.dll and paintdotnet.exe for about 3 weeks until it was able to boot up PDN. In WINE. For real.
>Here's PDN on .NET 10 win-x64, in WINE 11.14-dev, on Ubuntu, in WSL2, on Windows 11. And yes it works on real Linux too.
There is a very vocal section of the userbase who are vehemently anti-AI. Blocklists help avoid them (using them or being on them). However there is also a really good AI community on there. It's generally a lot less commercially-focused than on Twitter, for better and worse. It helps that atproto itself is really good for agents. They know how to use it, and the data is all open and accessible. Lots of people have been experimenting with agents that "live" on Bluesky, some of which are really interesting.
I wouldn't say it's a "really good AI community". There's not really much discussion that happens on new papers, techniques, new GPU kernels, topologies, etc etc. There's a few folks whose content I enjoy that generally revolves around philosophizing around how widespread LLM-style intelligence will affect society for both good and bad which is fun to read from time-to-time but not the level of context I desire out of an AI discussion.
Unless I'm not following the right people which can totally be the case. I've stopped using the platform regularly because of how present this mob mentality toxicity is on the site.
Why not just ignore them? Most of them are probably not Paint.net users anyway. Why listening to some randos most of who wouldn't be using your software anyway.
I wonder if we will ever get AI-optimized language sets, ie code instructions given specifically to AI agents to develop code for a JIT interpreter. This gives the same results each and every time the instruction to AI is given no matter the version of LLM used.
That's not true. The Bluesky team are themselves pretty pro-AI and open about how LLMs are used to build Bluesky and are necessary for moderation.
Lots of SWEs on Bluesky (e.g. me) use LLMs a lot and follow other people who do too.
On the other hand, artists and writers on there generally hate AI and will gladly take time out of their day to loudly gang up on anyone they see as betraying them.
I think they just meant it as "Bluesky the community" rather than "Bluesky Social, PBC employees". E.g. just like "HN loves corrections" (hello!) refers to the HN community and "Reddit discusses the title" the same.
We're in a reply chain discussing a mob of digital artists exercising verbal violence against a digital painting software author who used LLM to assist with the code. This is literally an analogous situation.
What does verbal violence mean non-hyperbolically to you?
>Verbal abuse (also known as [...] verbal violence [...]) is a type of psychological abuse that involves the use of oral or written language directed to a victim. Verbal abuse can include the act of harassing, labeling, insulting, scolding, rebuking, or excessive yelling towards an individual.
On the contrary I think that's an apt comparison. Look up the history of e.g. the Luddites. This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened in human history.
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.
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.
Note Pinta was only ever a port of the engine, Pinta's UI is a from-scratch Gtk# clone. Given the compelling reason to use Paint.NET was arguably the UI, that's a pretty big drawback.
I think the question nowadays would be "What's the least amount of tokens I could use for making this build on modern Linux?", with any amount of tokens, there isn't much you couldn't do with enough time.
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.
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.
Back when I was still on Windows(XP days), I made heavy use of Paint.net. Given Microsoft’s penchant for gobbling up smaller companies, I was always a bit surprised that they never bought the company and integrated paint.net as the built-in OS replacement for the original MS Paint.
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.
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'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.
Yes!
This is by far the number one program I've missed since I left Windows years ago. GIMP is so unfriendly, krita is for drawing, pinta is a very shallow clone that only just stopped crashing a few months ago. Paint.net is just better in every way.
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!)
How much in tokens/Claude subs would it cost to make a paint.net open source clone?
Seems like the kind of software that with enough tokens an agent would be able to create from scratch autonomously (because you have a clear goal and reference)
I'd guess with 5 max subs running fable 5.1 almost non stop it should be doable in a couple of weeks.
700k LoC of human written code is probably like 2M LoC of LLM "slop". That's probably around 8M tokens. Assuming a single fable agent that one shots the new source code at 30 tok/s, that's 74 hours. Of course it needs wayyy more tokens because it wouldn't one shot it, plus the reasoning tokens. Generation speed would be faster because you'd have many simultaneous agents though.
Bun rewrite took 6 days of coding and was a similar number of LoC, so I think a couple of weeks is definitely reasonable, although you probably need more than 5 Claude subs.
It's way more than 8M tokens. That might be around the amount of the raw output, but there's going to be tons of tool calls, back and forth... it's probably more like 100M+ tokens.
> Bun rewrite took 6 days of coding and was a similar number of LoC, so I think a couple of weeks is definitely reasonable, although you probably need more than 5 Claude subs.
Bun had numerous standardized and extensive javascript test suites to validate the slop code against. I doubt paint.net has test coverage anywhere near that complete, and without it using LLMs to rewrite something is a much larger risk.
Besides which, Bun claims the rewrite took 6 days but they took months after that to finish hammering out the bugs and actually ship, so I don't really buy the original price tag or timeline on their rewrite.
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.
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.
Paint.net was originally MIT licensed but the author closed its source because people did not give him credit. Note: The MIT license does not require credit.
Paint.net likely still benefits from the announcement of "Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Paint" long after switching to a proprietary license, which I find more dubious than using MIT-licensed code without giving credit to the author.
Also I rather doubt a "clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D" can be "written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible"?
The MIT notice starts with “Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>”, and who uses the code must include that line in any derived work.
> Also I rather doubt
Do you doubt Claude's rewrite can be defined as “clean room” (I also do)? Or that Claude is able to rewrite it? Or that it would not have been possible otherwise?
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.
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.
This feels like a distinction without a difference. Would you say a Python script/Java utility doesn't "run on Linux" because you need Python/Java installed?
Semantically you wouldn't, because they require their specific run-times. The difference is that those run-times are built to work natively on Linux (and often are enmeshed within its distributions), whereas any software requiring WINE is built to natively work on Windows, but is able to be translated for Linux. That distinction, between a native built runtime and a translation layer, is pretty major, and I think is why you can argue the colloquial usage of the term 'runs on Linux' differs between the two.
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'.
As someone who went to paint.net as a child this is great news!
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 a link to getpaint.net was a legitimate paint company.
Some time after 2012, the domain name was acquired by another entity (associated with a "domain investor"), which allegedly turned the website into an imitation of getpaint.net in 2025, allowing the developer to file a successful lawsuit based on trademark infringement.
https://alldomains.app/paint-net-after-22-years-software-dev...
the number of times i did this! good for them.
I didn't realize Paint.net was closed-source now. What's the best alternative, Pinta?
It's been closed source for 16+ years. Some background:
* https://blog.paint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of...
* https://blog.paint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paintnet...
> The biggest problem was that, even though these were clearly unethical and deplorable actions, the MIT License permitted all of it.
Seriously? Why not go GPL then?
Because that is even worse for what he wants to allow.
Which is what, exactly? As far as I can tell, it seems more about what he wants to not allow. At the end of the day I respect an author's choice whether to close source to something even if I disagree with it, but it feels a little euphemistic to describe that as "allowing" something.
Paint.Net was only really open source entirely from 2004-2007 and partially from 2007-2009 (engine only, not the UI for the latter part).
My experience: Pinta is an inferior Paint.NET . It's about the same level of complexity, but everything is just like... 60-85% as good.
Krita is a heavier program, but has a similar level of polish. You might not use half the features, but Krita's what I'd suggest for anyone wanting an open source alternative to Paint.net
Pinta is based on an old Paint.net code
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.
If you really miss the simplicity of MSPaint and need something that's quick and no layer complications: KolourPaint.
If open source matters more than anything else, there's always GIMP.
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.
Pinta is obviously not as capable, but yeah, it's by far the most usable general-purpose photo editor on Linux that I've found.
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.)
Apparently the author got a surprising amount of backlash on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...
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.
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
There’s nothing surprising or confusing here.
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.
It's BlueSky lol. If your way to 'read the room' is to read BlueSky replies then you're already in a pretty doomed position.
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.
It's possible to tune your Bluesky filter bubble to avoid those people.
If you ever tell you use AI on BlueSky, they will put your account on a list to be "shadowbanned" basically.
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.
BlueSky in no way represents a very large number of humans. Most laypeople I've spoken to are fairly neutral on AI at this point.
Bluesky is not real life.
AI haters are basically a very small minority and almost all of them are online. It isn't a large number.
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.
> 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?
Because the most vocal people are always a minority and I can use my own good judgement.
I am also not in any "bubble" group and I am one of those people that are very suspicious of cliques.
I spent as much time talking to people that are neutral, positive and negative on AI.
Most of the AI haters IME of interacting with them irrational and are full of very poor arguments for their position. Almost all of it is emotional and/or out of ignorance. I've seen the exact same arguments made on US and UK based websites.
A lot of AI-skepticism I've encountered IRL/more-normie space comes from fears of what their children will do for work and the large data centre projects being approved by government without enough consultation of local residents. I think these are both valid concerns.
I think you might be misunderstanding what I mean by the word "bubble". It's quite literally impossible to talk to a representative sample of people the size of the internet, so judging purely by people you've interacted with is to me by definition a bubble. The fact that you claim to have sought out conversations with a variety of viewpoints but someone are of the opinion that the people online can't possibly represent a substantial group or are worth taking seriously rather than maybe just people you haven't talked to directly is a bit hard not to be skeptical of.
You seem to be under the impression that I’m only talking to a small group of people. I’m talking about conversing on forums and Discord, reading different news articles, watching different media, and hearing it discussed by people who are both IT/software professionals and people who work in other fields. I am deliberately avoiding taking my information from a clique or a bubble, as I’ve already explained.
Moreover, I personally find this sort of discussion point / tactic to be very frustrating. It essentially stops any form of discussion, doesn't provide me or anyone else new information and doesn't really point anything out that is incorrect with my rationale than it isn't statistically sound when I wasn't pretending it was. I've factored that into my thought process and I am open to changing my mind.
My rationale is relatively simple:
- It is known that the most vocal/extreme people (on any side of any issues) are a minority, there is nothing controversial with this statement.
- It is also known that there is a technological adoption curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle) which is basically a bell curve. This model is well known and I don't think there is much that is controversial with the basic premise of it.
- When anything that is pushed too much and AI has been hyped massively, there will be a reaction and people will push back.
I can then use this knowledge and then apply it to what I am seeing online and IRL and then form my opinion, which I have already stated.
Now I understand that some people can get drawn into cliques and "bubbles" where they only see information that confirms their own confirmation bias. That is why I bothered listening to people that hold opposite opinions to my own.
I've found many of the arguments to simply be poor including people that many people laud like Ed Zitron (you may have seen there was a blog post by Danluu saying he has been consistently wrong that was on this site a few days ago). I also think that they are essentially in their own bubble.
So this idea that I (or anyone else) cannot be cautiously skeptical and attempt a level headed assessment of sentiment based on what I am seeing online and IRL because it isn't rigorously statistically sound is a nonsense and just derails any discussions into where I having to defend what is a relatively normal (albeit informal) decision making process.
Does every single one of these posters have a cartoon avatar? What's going on here?
what's wrong with cartoon avatars...? im not sure i follow
Where did I say something was wrong with them?
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.
My guess is they are hobby artists who think that AI and piracy are the only things preventing them from making it big. There’s more of these out there than you would think.
If you look at the quality of their avatars it becomes clear why they aren’t making money as artists.
I didn't quite want to say it myself since I've been so negative sometimes lately. But it was something I noticed and picking a random profile to view was pretty stomach turning.
But I get there is backlash. Not everyone lives in the bubble HN does. Not even everyone here is accepting of AI. I don't even know where I stand many times. But something feels off about this response. It's certainly looking brigaded.
On my home feed was another AI announcement. Few comments. Zero hate. And I definitely expected more there.
Paint.NET is (partially) art software. The art community has a negative view of AI. Therefore announcements of AI use in Paint.NET get a negative reaction, more so than something like AI startup #491000
I see your point, but I always got the impression that Paint.NET was a barebones image/photo editor for power users. Typically something full featured like Photoshop, Krita, or Illustrator would be more in the art software camp, IMHO.
A basic AM/FM radio does receive radio, but you wouldn’t lump it in with a Yaesu or even a Baofeng.
I’m just surprised to see so many strong opinions from people who probably don’t even use the software (although they pretend they do).
You can use a nitter instance: https://x.n0g.xyz/ChrisCroy/status/2094867317163540937
Wow, I thought they all shut down after elon's CnD
Using a domain that resembles a racial slur isn't a good look.
Forgive my lack of familiarity with racial slurs, but what part of that resembles a racial slur?
I must be naive, but how does that resemble?
I'm guessing the n0g part. I would never have thought that if someone hadn't said it. I'd have thought of "egg nog" long before a racial slur.
I want to say there was an image board that would substitute another n-word with nignogs because they thought it was funny but my memory can be hazy
he probably means the nitter part, not the literal domain. never occurred to me before tho.
Call me crazy, but for me the next stop after nitter is knitter, not the other thing.
isn't nitter literally just "not twitter"?
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!
What the hell is going on with those people (or bots?)?
Bluesky is a biker bar with an askew "safe space" sign awkwardly taped to the door.
Do not blame the bikers, they usually are very friendly people. :-)
Sure - they even unselfishly share all their noises with as much people as possible. As much as the engine can produce (i.e. better be a rich biker, then you can make your engine share a lot more or it).
Just FYI, Honda Goldwing (the archetypal Huge Luxurious Expensive 1800cc Motorcycle For Your Mid-Life Crisis) has about the same noise level as any ordinary car. I had one for years. Please don't lump everyone up under "they", you only notice the loud ones.
Then you are not a "biker". You just ride a motorcycle. (The most major) Part of being a biker is to disrupt with noise. Or why do the machines (typically) get louder and louder with the price tag? Because technology doesn't know a way to do better? Sure... Vote me down, but don't ask me to be naive. The major part of that hobby is to be unpleasantly loud in public spaces (the more people around the better).
My gravel bike is absolutely silent! And I tell you it was really expensive.
Gold is also absolutely silent. ;)
But I like it a lot... My personal fitness level is just enough to bring me to my car, though... ^^ And I know that's bad... Keep cycling! ;)
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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.
Those responses are disgusting. I bet you every one of these individuals criticised X for being toxic.
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".
X and bluesky can both be toxic
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What is wrong with people?! Geez.
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?
People say X is toxic, but Bluesky really is on another level
This in no way diminishes the toxicity of X
I'd say overall bluesky is better but boy howdy is it differently stupid sometimes.
Bluesky is pretty decent and has features that I like over X, but much of its user base are from the Great Xodus (pardon the pun): people who frame their switch to Bluesky as some kind of boycott of X, ie, a bunch of moralists. They didn't leave X because it's a hellscape of trashing and toxicity, no, they left because the politics changed. And so Bluesky is now saturated with people who are very opinionated, very loud about it, and very willing to engage in trashing.
Yes, bluesky is absolutely saturated with people who are loud and opinionated and willing to engage in trashing.
Entirely different than twitter, in that respect.
Nah, Twitter is still absolutely rotten with toxicity. The Great Xodus happened due to the rapid chuddification of Twitter under its new management: it was over politics, not toxicity. As such they brought the toxicity with them like a plague.
Bluesky has this nice feature where you can mute lists, so someone made a MAGA list (https://bsky.app/profile/skywatch.blue/lists/3l53cjwlt4o2s), and yet I was still seeing MAGA stuff on my feed because all the Twitter refugees were screenshotting Twitter nonsense and laundering it into my feed. Utterly ridiculous.
I find myself agreeing with this a lot, as well as the secondhand amplification many do. I get some want to brigade but often times that very action is what leads to all sorts of awful content coming upon social media feeds in general, because they simply have to show others how awful this thing they saw was.
Its not exclusive to bluesky by any margin, but it does become especially concerning as a double standard to filter lists.
Yes, I guess my sarcasm pen is broken. I agree with you.
Lol no X was and is toxic af
Exile usually connotes being forced out from a place.
The distinction is important because no one asked them to leave.
I originally had "self exiles" but thought the Xile pun was funnier :P
"Xodus"!
Stealing that
To riff of an old political joke: X is for the evil party, bluesky is for the stupid party.
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for real, improving free open source software is one of the positives of AI
Paint.net is closed source
Yeah, mod team reacted accordingly. The site needs automated dogpiling detection and intervention. It's a problem.
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.
> Alright everyone, message received. I was not expecting this response, I honestly had no idea before I made the post
The source got deleted, what is the backlash even about? People don't like .net software running on Linux?
> Like I said, the code is experimental. A proof of concept showing that PDN-on-WINE is possible. It's not finished. I can literally just delete it. It won't be part of the next build.
This almost sounds like sarcasm and a reference to the whole "The Bun-rewritten-in-Rust branch is just a prototype and probably means nothing" Tweet that initially made the frontpage when it. But I think it's in earnest, just very similar to how I remember that Tweet I suppose.
>The source got deleted, what is the backlash even about?
It's Bluesky, they hate AI so the mob bullied him to delete the posts
https://web.archive.org/web/20260901203707/https://bsky.app/...
>Paint .NET-on-WINE has never been possible because of Direct2D, which WINE has really struggled with (for good reasons).
>So like ... why not reimplement Direct2D-in-Paint .NET? Remove the dependency on WINE completely. Clean room reverse engineering ...
>Thanks to Claude Code, it's now a reality. More story in the link above.
>It's buggy and slow, but real progress is being made.
>And I have no idea when/if this will be "production ready" or "supported" or even "good enough." Maybe next year, maybe next month, maybe 2035.
>Claude made more progress on this in 3 weeks than we've seen in the 12 years since PDN started using Direct2D in 2014.
>This isn't to talk down to the WINE folks, btw. Direct2D has a really complicated effects system, and probably only PDN really uses it, so the ROI was very low.
>AI doesn't care. And it doesn't get tired. And this is the perfect task for it: it already has the design (D2D's docs and API), and it already has a known-good implementation of it and an app to test against and bang its head against.
>So that's what it did: it banged its head against d2d1.dll and paintdotnet.exe for about 3 weeks until it was able to boot up PDN. In WINE. For real.
>Here's PDN on .NET 10 win-x64, in WINE 11.14-dev, on Ubuntu, in WSL2, on Windows 11. And yes it works on real Linux too.
> It's Bluesky, they hate AI
There is a very vocal section of the userbase who are vehemently anti-AI. Blocklists help avoid them (using them or being on them). However there is also a really good AI community on there. It's generally a lot less commercially-focused than on Twitter, for better and worse. It helps that atproto itself is really good for agents. They know how to use it, and the data is all open and accessible. Lots of people have been experimenting with agents that "live" on Bluesky, some of which are really interesting.
I wouldn't say it's a "really good AI community". There's not really much discussion that happens on new papers, techniques, new GPU kernels, topologies, etc etc. There's a few folks whose content I enjoy that generally revolves around philosophizing around how widespread LLM-style intelligence will affect society for both good and bad which is fun to read from time-to-time but not the level of context I desire out of an AI discussion.
Unless I'm not following the right people which can totally be the case. I've stopped using the platform regularly because of how present this mob mentality toxicity is on the site.
> the mob bullied him to delete the posts
Why not just ignore them? Most of them are probably not Paint.net users anyway. Why listening to some randos most of who wouldn't be using your software anyway.
For a lot of humans, having a large number of people criticize you heavily has an emotional toll independent of the technical merits of their claims
I wonder if we will ever get AI-optimized language sets, ie code instructions given specifically to AI agents to develop code for a JIT interpreter. This gives the same results each and every time the instruction to AI is given no matter the version of LLM used.
I believe you want compilers?
> It's Bluesky, they hate AI
That's not true. The Bluesky team are themselves pretty pro-AI and open about how LLMs are used to build Bluesky and are necessary for moderation.
Lots of SWEs on Bluesky (e.g. me) use LLMs a lot and follow other people who do too.
On the other hand, artists and writers on there generally hate AI and will gladly take time out of their day to loudly gang up on anyone they see as betraying them.
I think they just meant it as "Bluesky the community" rather than "Bluesky Social, PBC employees". E.g. just like "HN loves corrections" (hello!) refers to the HN community and "Reddit discusses the title" the same.
Same feeling as well. Bluesky is also a place amenable to bots.
Use of Claude Code for an application used by artists. Just a fundamental misalignment of expectations.
Makes no sense. I don't see physical artists being upset that their pencils were manufactured in a factory instead of hand made.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.
We're in a reply chain discussing a mob of digital artists exercising verbal violence against a digital painting software author who used LLM to assist with the code. This is literally an analogous situation.
>verbal violence
Clearly there's hyperbole on both sides
What does verbal violence mean non-hyperbolically to you?
>Verbal abuse (also known as [...] verbal violence [...]) is a type of psychological abuse that involves the use of oral or written language directed to a victim. Verbal abuse can include the act of harassing, labeling, insulting, scolding, rebuking, or excessive yelling towards an individual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_abuse
On the contrary I think that's an apt comparison. Look up the history of e.g. the Luddites. This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened in human history.
Not surprising. Bluesky is full of wannabe programmers who love talking down to actual developers.
Here is the source code of the last open source (MIT) release from 2008
Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux
https://web.archive.org/web/20080000000000*/http://www.dotpd...
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.
Pinta is the continuation of this source, it already exists.
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.
Note Pinta was only ever a port of the engine, Pinta's UI is a from-scratch Gtk# clone. Given the compelling reason to use Paint.NET was arguably the UI, that's a pretty big drawback.
The UI is pretty similar. It's very intuitive for someone used to Paint.NET. Pinta definitely satisfies my desire for Paint.NET on Linux.
> Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux
I think the question nowadays would be "What's the least amount of tokens I could use for making this build on modern Linux?", with any amount of tokens, there isn't much you couldn't do with enough time.
No, the question is "Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux" not "Wonder how much slop I can generate".
> No, the question is "Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux"
But of course it can, anything is doable with enough time and resources.
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?
Seems that it is doable:
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.
Wow, PixiEditor looks really cool.
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).
https://github.com/kde/krita
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?
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I use Krita, but I miss Paint.NET
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.
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.
Back when I was still on Windows(XP days), I made heavy use of Paint.net. Given Microsoft’s penchant for gobbling up smaller companies, I was always a bit surprised that they never bought the company and integrated paint.net as the built-in OS replacement for the original MS Paint.
I'd reverse the question and ask is there any reason to continue developing in .NET and windows-only languages when windows allows for WSL apps.
.NET is not a windows-only language. Actually .NET is not a language, C# is a language. I am currently working on a .NET GUI application for macOS.
Paint.NET has a *lot* of legacy code that cannot just be discarded. The dev said as much in their original post.
Washington State University not University of Washington
Don't forget that it actively spies on the user! Say no to telemetry.
This is via Wine, so presumably it should also run on Macs now.
Paint.net is the only thing I miss from my days on Windows machines, so super excited about this!
I also miss paint.net on Mac. Pinta gets pretty close though: https://www.pinta-project.com/
Unlikely to see wide distribution on Linux given the license
The license allows redistribution so I don't think it would be prohibitive to it being distributed.
Paint.net itself is still not open-source, so no distro will distribute it.
If this shin even becomes "good enough" then I'm sure it will appear in the AUR and flathhub, however.
Lots of distros distribute nonfree software.
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.
[0]: https://forums.paint.net/topic/134563-%F0%9F%8D%B7-extremely...
Why is Direct2D so hard to implement in Wine?
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.
How can one claim clean room if developed by a model? “Don’t use stolen code, yo”?
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.
Yes! This is by far the number one program I've missed since I left Windows years ago. GIMP is so unfriendly, krita is for drawing, pinta is a very shallow clone that only just stopped crashing a few months ago. Paint.net is just better in every way.
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!)
How much in tokens/Claude subs would it cost to make a paint.net open source clone?
Seems like the kind of software that with enough tokens an agent would be able to create from scratch autonomously (because you have a clear goal and reference)
I'd guess with 5 max subs running fable 5.1 almost non stop it should be doable in a couple of weeks.
The author says it's about 700k LoC that he's worked on for 20 years.[1] I don't know how many tokens that arrives at, but that seems non-trivial.
[1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/rick-brewster/
700k LoC of human written code is probably like 2M LoC of LLM "slop". That's probably around 8M tokens. Assuming a single fable agent that one shots the new source code at 30 tok/s, that's 74 hours. Of course it needs wayyy more tokens because it wouldn't one shot it, plus the reasoning tokens. Generation speed would be faster because you'd have many simultaneous agents though.
Bun rewrite took 6 days of coding and was a similar number of LoC, so I think a couple of weeks is definitely reasonable, although you probably need more than 5 Claude subs.
It's way more than 8M tokens. That might be around the amount of the raw output, but there's going to be tons of tool calls, back and forth... it's probably more like 100M+ tokens.
> Bun rewrite took 6 days of coding and was a similar number of LoC, so I think a couple of weeks is definitely reasonable, although you probably need more than 5 Claude subs.
Bun had numerous standardized and extensive javascript test suites to validate the slop code against. I doubt paint.net has test coverage anywhere near that complete, and without it using LLMs to rewrite something is a much larger risk.
Besides which, Bun claims the rewrite took 6 days but they took months after that to finish hammering out the bugs and actually ship, so I don't really buy the original price tag or timeline on their rewrite.
Obviously the agent would need to build a very extensive test setup for Paint.NET, a lot of it with computer use or something similar.
Opening the same files, performing the same clicks, etc should output the same on paint.net and the clone.
Obviously, yes. That's why it needs to be included in any estimate.
My point being "a few weeks and 8M tokens" is wildly unrealistic.
Yeah for sure. Easily 10x that. And obviously we're talking just output tokens. I was mostly just pointing out a theoretical lower bound.
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.
> I think it's roughly possible for any piece of software.
Still not possible for games (many people are attempting it on X).
It's definitely getting better with every new model and it's just a matter of time before they can actually do it.
Fable 5.1 is quite strong
https://x.com/loktar00/status/2095192155086057978
(that's just a main menu, other people are attempting entire games which is way more difficult of course and results much weaker)
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.
> and EXTREMELY experimental support for running on WINE/Linux.
So it needs Wine.
Paint.net was originally MIT licensed but the author closed its source because people did not give him credit. Note: The MIT license does not require credit.
https://blog.paint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of...
Paint.net likely still benefits from the announcement of "Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Paint" long after switching to a proprietary license, which I find more dubious than using MIT-licensed code without giving credit to the author.
Also I rather doubt a "clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D" can be "written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible"?
> Note: The MIT license does not require credit.
The MIT notice starts with “Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>”, and who uses the code must include that line in any derived work.
> Also I rather doubt
Do you doubt Claude's rewrite can be defined as “clean room” (I also do)? Or that Claude is able to rewrite it? Or that it would not have been possible otherwise?
> The MIT license does not require credit.
Actually, credit is the ONLY thing that license requires
By the way, had the cheerful vibe coded attitude spilled much into the main codebase or is it only contained in the new platform?
That was the last software that held me to windows
I hope plugin makers are going to port them too
Ha, I was just searching to see how I could run it on linux, NICE!
wow if the paint.net people are trying to win an award for most popup advertising on one web page, they have my vote!
That's awesome news. Many good free apps that run on Win/MacOS should be ported to Linux.
Sounds good, but why a .Net app can't work with .NET 10? Does it use Windows-only features?
It uses Direct2D which most of the post is about.
They added the support by slopping a Direct2D emulation layer together.
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.
But does it support AI and mcp? Was just kidding.
Hugged to death? website is not working for me from the xfinity network.
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.
Wine is not the same as "runs on Linux". Able to be run on Linux with wine, sure.
This feels like a distinction without a difference. Would you say a Python script/Java utility doesn't "run on Linux" because you need Python/Java installed?
Programs running under wine don't have the same level of system/desktop integration as native programs, it's a very important distinction.
You still haven't explained how this is different from Python or Java applications.
Semantically you wouldn't, because they require their specific run-times. The difference is that those run-times are built to work natively on Linux (and often are enmeshed within its distributions), whereas any software requiring WINE is built to natively work on Windows, but is able to be translated for Linux. That distinction, between a native built runtime and a translation layer, is pretty major, and I think is why you can argue the colloquial usage of the term 'runs on Linux' differs between the two.
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It is very buggy, was AI slop coded, and barely works.
This is not a good release.
Don't support poorly made software. Use Gimp, Pinta, or Krita on Linux.