Paint.net

I&#x27;ve been using paint.net for years now and it does have some pros.<p>- Sufficient even for mid-complexity art tasks<p>- Nice, simple interface<p>- Plenty of plugins<p>I don&#x27;t mind the proprietary format -- since I&#x27;m usually just doing quick tasks in it, I&#x27;m either saving as jpg or png, or don&#x27;t expect to need to open the pdn file at some later time or in other software.<p>However for anyone looking to start with something new, I&#x27;d really recommend using Krita or some other more recent program. Paint.net&#x27;s available plugins are wildly disorganized, spread across at least one forum and hundreds of threads, often out of date or not working as intended, etc.<p>Great community and they deserve all the praise for maintaining free software for many years, but much like Gimp, it&#x27;s just not the best free option available anymore.

I use Paint.Net on my Windows machines. It&#x27;s a great piece of software—and free. I bought the Microsoft Store version to support the author, although I continue to install the free download.<p>I also run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;viliusle&#x2F;miniPaint">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;viliusle&#x2F;miniPaint</a> using Cloudflare Pages so it&#x27;s hosted in one of my sub-domains as minipaint.[mydomainhere] and it&#x27;s great for quick jobs.

Paint.net is the one thing I missed when I switched from Windows to Mac when M1 came out.<p>It&#x27;s a brilliant quick photo editor.<p>People say to use Pinta on Mac but it&#x27;s not the same. The closest I&#x27;ve found is Pixelmator Pro, which is also awesome, but is not free and quite a bit heavier than Paint.net.

Oh yes. I found Paint.Net and used it for many years as a quick photo editing solution. It&#x27;s lightweight, reasonably fast and sophisticated enough for most daily tasks. However, I find I no longer install it on my new Windows boxes because of Photopea. Photopea is kind of a Photoshop Express clone and runs entirely in the browser. It&#x27;s amazing how fast and easy photo editing software can be. WASM is really amazing stuff!<p>If you want a cross-platform photo editing tool, give it a try!

paint.net is one of the only pieces of software that I miss from Windows. After having started with Tux Paint, I found paint.net extremely intuitive and easy to use (very nice for making goofy memes in middle&#x2F;high school, and quick&#x2F;easy drawings). I think that even after not having used it for years I am still more productive in it than I am in, say, Photoshop or GIMP.

Did something new happen with paint.net? Or just a post to remind us?<p>I love paint.net. Recently purchased a windows store license for it. Clearly a winner for most of the image editing needs I have, for things like basic cropping, dpi changes, or changing formats. I treat it like I did GraphicConverter on Mac. Just a beloved image tool.<p>Lately I’ve been using it for simple file conversion with roll20, to hand-tune my assets for small downloads with webp.

I&#x27;ve been using Pant dot NET for 20 years since the initial version.<p>The project was originally started by WSU (Washington State University)&#x27;s Rick Brewster and his team with backed MSFT.<p>But it wasn&#x27;t adopted for Windows.

Like many others, I was a die hard Paint.NET person while Windows-only. When I went multiplatform 8 years ago, Krita took its place. Bulkier, buggier and in some ways less convenient, but so many great features and fully cross platform. I tried pdn again recently and was shocked at the chaos that plugins still are.<p>I recall trying Gimp 2.99 with the new UI some years ago (they take their time don&#x27;t they) and finally liking it a lot. I would love for it to get a popularity boost like Blender did.

It is one of few softwares, I believe MSFT should simply sponsor and promote, maybe make it opensource. It is a perfect application, Windows only built in dotnet, loved by users and has a perfect positioning.

This was _the_ one thing that kept me switching from Windows to Linux.<p>Bit the bullet and now I full time use Krita and Linux Mint. But it doesn&#x27;t stop me from pulling it open anytime I need to do work on a Windows PC. Great for Cg (with its builtin .dds support!) and texture work (.vtf and other plugins)<p>The community has been good to me. Good piece of software.

I use a Mac now, but have a Windows VM running in Parallels. Paint.net is one of the first apps I installed on that VM. It&#x27;s ridiculously easy and intuitive.

Since I didn&#x27;t see it mentioned, my multiplatform (Java based) alternative to Paint.net is Pixelitor, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pixelitor.sourceforge.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pixelitor.sourceforge.io&#x2F;</a> Something in between MS Paint - Paint.net I think.<p>I also use XPaint; it&#x27;s quite capable but the interface is very different, too much deviated from usual GUI apps.

Been using paint.net for years. The only downside it has is mentioning it&#x27;s name, because people keep going to the completely unrelated &quot;paint.net&quot; website. Super fucking annoying.<p>Anyhow, the only paint program I&#x27;ve used in years. I consider it to be the modern Deluxe Paint ][. Can&#x27;t get anyone to use it though, because they&#x27;re all clueless normies stuck in the belief they need to use PhotoShop for <i>everything</i>.<p>If that makes no sense to you, consider the insane amount of people who buy an expensive DSLR, because they believe it makes them better photographers. Hint: It doesn&#x27;t.

I do not use this for two reasons:<p>- It is not open source.<p>- It does only run on Windows.<p>Alternatives include Krita, Pinta and The GIMP.

When I remember right, Paint.net has this funny origin story: someone wanted to proof that .NET was not suitable for delivering a paint application. He proofed himself otherwise and made a permanent job out of it.

Paint.net is great. I even purchased it from the Windows store even though you can install it for free outside of that channel. The one thing that does annoy me about it is that there&#x27;s no way to dock the floating windows. I&#x27;m sure being able to rearrange them is great for some people&#x27;s workflows but for me, I&#x27;d prefer them just to be docked to the main window. Maybe something like Visual Studio where everything can be docked to any side or completely undocked but just a everything docked option would be fine for me.

Always choose this app but find myself using Irfan view for printing nearly every time as the Windows native print dialog which paint.net and other image apps use to be severely lacking.

Ah, memories. When I was on Windows I did all my edits and &#x27;shops in this. Capable enough for layering and clone stamping, I touched up images of friends and I in absurd situations. E.g. a photo of us camping was made to look like a battle scene from Call of Duty 4. Then I shared it on Fb for a few likes and comments.<p>I wonder if the younger generation still make time for things like this. Wouldn&#x27;t have happened without Paint.NET, I was too conscientious to pirate Photoshop.

Some more discussion earlier this year:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34334780">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34334780</a>

The main thing I remember about Paint.net are forced updates and being the only software besides windows update to create system restore points. Always felt a bit overkill for updating a basic graphics program. It was great to have something free with more features than Paint and less complicated than GIMP though.

It&#x27;s sad to see that paint.net (the domain) is parked now. Back in the day they had a little notice at the top of their site for people (like me) who were looking for Paint.NET&#x27;s website. I always thought that was super cool of them because they didn&#x27;t have to do that.

recently i went looking for a (slightly more featureful) mspaint.exe replacement for linux and found <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maoschanz.github.io&#x2F;drawing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maoschanz.github.io&#x2F;drawing&#x2F;</a> to be serviceable.

Recently I’ve been using Photopea and it has been excellent. Web based and very full featured

Regarding its native file format, IIRC it&#x27;s a dump (aka serialization) of the internal structures used in the program. More or less like the old Office did for its native doc and xls files.

I still prefer paint shop pro from the 1990&#x27;s (some of the versions from back then are 32 bit and mostly run in windows)<p>it runs extremely fast on any modern windows box

Paint.NET is by far my most missed Windows app on linux. GIMP is a mess of UI and Pinta just crashes constantly and is lacking in features.

I don&#x27;t like how it forces you to update. Maybe you can disable that though? Haven&#x27;t bothered to check. :D

Paint.net was the program to get me into graphic design. I hold this, and Notepad++ as the killer apps for Windows.

This, Notepad++ and IrfanView are the 3 pieces of Software that truly set my Windows PCs apart from my MacBook.

It is a great piece of software but annoying that you can&#x27;t edit text.

Photopea.com! It&#x27;s basically a free version of Photoshop.<p>I haven&#x27;t used paint.net in like a decade(maybe 2 decades). I didn&#x27;t like the interface at all. And it seemed to heavily rely on .NET graphics APIs, which are fine, I guess. Hopefully it&#x27;s improved since then. Doesn&#x27;t sound like it. Closed source now? Meh.

Disappointing to see that they still didn&#x27;t port it to other platforms after all these years. I thought that should be easy to do since .net is multiplatform.<p>I can&#x27;t say I understand the strategy, there are enough painting programs for Windows (which they even seem to focus on extra much on the frontpage of the website too) yet they are donation based but exclude other platforms.

Paint.Net is an example of how to make great apps. Very focused, fast and easy to use.<p>I tried multiple alternatives, including Krita, which was the most decent. But its layout, speed, colorschemes, behaviors and some visual bugs are meh compared to subj. The most annoying is its content window black-flash when the cursor crosses the border.<p>Btw, does someone know a good SD webui plugin for PDN?

proprietary app, proprietary format (pdn), which coincidentally is the only supported one that works with layers. save yourself the trouble of locking yourself into this format and app.

very good - wish it supported other platforms.

i love this app its so easy to use