Holy shit, it’s happening, guys. Paint.net is getting official wine support. You know the windows situation is getting bad when even the developer of an app exclusively aimed at Windows is now shifting support to wine…
They’re contributing to the wine project and everything 🥲 https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60276
I came on here a few months ago ranting about direct 2D stub functions. Two days ago the dev stopped calling those exact direct 2D functions https://github.com/paintdotnet/Paint.NET-on-Wine/releases/tag/v5.200.9785.36400
What a time to be alive. Truly a great time to be a Paint.net enjoyer.

How is this a meme?
Immediately made cover art for Lutris because why not

I don’t understand this interface. Where’s the AI button? /s
I’m sure Matthieu/Strider would appreciate that.
It’s interesting that it’s seemingly easier to make the windows version of Paint.NET work on Wine, than bother compiling it for .NET on Linux? I wonder if the dev regrets starting with .NET in the first place?
compiling it for .NET on Linux
It always sounds so simple for the layperson. Just looking through the list of DLLs in the portable ZIP, PDN uses Windows Forms (
System.Windows.Formsnamespace), which, as far as I understand, isn’t included in the cross-platform releases of .NET. They’d have to rebuild the entire UI with .NET MAUI or some other cross-platform toolkit. Then there are lots of other bundled libraries that may or may not work in a .NET-on-Linux environment.Releasing and then supporting a second platform is never as easy as just compiling the executable. Figuring out the quirks and differences of various systems, especially one as heterogenous as the Linux ecosystem, is a drain on resources that small development studios often can’t afford. Raiguard (hallowed be his name), one of the developers of Factorio, and the person who is single-handedly maintaining the Linux-native build, wrote a blog post about its challenges.
And people wonder why so many devs use Electron. It may be slow and a RAM hog but hey it works.
Well, if you want cross-platform anything, not using a Microsoft framework is the first step to success…
One nitpick: MAUI isn’t cross-platform in the sense that it runs on Linux. Okay, it does on Android, but not desktop Linux.
They’d have to go with something third-party like Avalonia.
@rtxn @BananaTrifleViolin Nothing prevents you from using Window Forms implementation form mono
Except Mono implements the Windows-only .NET Framework, but PDN targets .NET 9. I have no idea how those two could be used at the same time for different parts of the app, what kinds of issues may arise from it, or if it can be done at all. Again, it sounds simple, but it never is.
@rtxn there is net9 winforms port:
https://github.com/DemonBigj781/X11Forms/tree/feat/net9-port-and-compatAdding dependencies, adding complexity, adding points of failure… not to mention that the first sentence in the readme literally says it’s an experimental project. Not something that a production software should ever be built upon.
Yeah, if only they could do a proper port. Looks too difficult at this point.
right, wasn’t Mono supposed to handle things like this?
It makes no sense, .NET is fully supported on Linux and has been for years. There is an official SDK and it’s capable of creating full standalone executables, or smaller ones requiring the runtime libraries to be installed on the target system. As far as I know good packages exist for just about any distro. .NET is fully open source and not just worked on by Microsoft, but a large community.
Creating a Linux executable from any .NET code is as simple as running a single command, it supports cross platform compilation as well. With support for a range of architectures and OSes.
The only caveat is all the code needs to be properly managed code, any unmanaged code is most likely not cross platform compatible and is thus not recommended. It can even break as drivers or the OS is updated for example, so it’s a bad idea to have unmanaged code and usually not needed.
Only “.NET core” is cross Plattform. “.NET framework” is Windows only. If they startend developing in framework they cant simply compile to linux.
.NET framework has been discontinued for years now with .NET platform being the official successor. It’s no longer called .NET core. If one started with framework, moving over to platform is very easy as it’s the exact same language. If thet were on framework still, it would mean they haven’t updated in years, which would be weird and not recommended.
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That is such a false comparison lol
Just commenting here so I can pick this up later. I’m still deeply interested in this. The Pinta interface has not be as intuitive than what paint.net has been
Feel free to ask me any questions if you need help setting it up. There’s also another repo I haven’t looked into yet here: https://github.com/toehead2001/Paint.NETOnWine
I literally just took the latest portable build, threw it into lutris, and set the wine version to 11.20. You only need the install.sh if you don’t already have the required wine components, which my system already did.
There’s literally a button to save a post or comment.
Me who’s been pinned on 2.1.2 since the abysmal GTK3 upgrade: You know what, I might just check that out!
Excellent news 😃
I wasn’t familiar with paint.net so I went looking and this stood out to me:
It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.
This is on their main page, in the main description of what paint.net is and what it does. Whatever happened to that fork of GIMP that dropped the fucking atrocious branding.
This right here is an example of why it’s bad, because this chump gets to get away with making a reference to the idea of a sexual “gimp.” It’s been a bad name for a long time now.
I get that rebrands are hard but fuck me, adding the word “The” before it makes it seem so crass and worthless in comparison to the other things in the list which aren’t given skeevy fucking nicknames.
You’re allowing people not directly involved in the project to fucking make it look weird and creepy by keeping the fucking name.
I’m tired.
/end of only semi-related rant, please excuse me
That excerpt is extremely old, and if memory serves correctly, it *is * how they used to be branded…
…and is yet more evidence that the old branding was atrocious and they need to drop this childish “tee hee we made a sex joke” about a scene from an overrated movie from the 90s.
I hate this aspect of open source, and the giggling, crass immaturity of a mass number of men within the open source community.
Did you just called Pulp Fiction overrated?
Honestly, Pulp Fiction probably is overrated.
Like, it’s a good movie, a great movie even. But even when it’s compared to only movies released in the same year, it’s barely top 5.
This is the same year as Forest Gump, Shawshank Redemption, The Lion King, and The Professional
Yes. Get over it. Keep wanking the dick of a creep who looks for any excuse to drop the n-bomb in his films. I don’t give a shit. Tarantino is wildly overrated in general.
Just wanted to make sure.








