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!)
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
As if Linux desktop had good integration to start with. Examples I'm annoyed at right now:
Major Ubuntu upgrades break every clipboard manager for GNOME I've ever found, and that's an official extension API.
Opening something on a tabbed app (VS Code, Firefox) from the shell or file explorer prefers to add a tab on an existing window from a different desktop than to open a new window on the current one, like the same apps do on Windows.
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!)
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