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.
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.
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.
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.
If you look at the quality of their avatars it becomes clear why they aren’t making money as artists.
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.
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).
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.
Entirely different than twitter, in that respect.
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.
The distinction is important because no one asked them to leave.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux
https://web.archive.org/web/20080000000000*/http://www.dotpd...
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.
But of course it can, anything is doable with enough time and resources.
* https://blog.paint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of...
* https://blog.paint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paintnet...
Seriously? Why not go GPL then?
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
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.
Paint.net is the only thing I miss from my days on Windows machines, so super excited about this!
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Opening the same files, performing the same clicks, etc should output the same on paint.net and the clone.
My point being "a few weeks and 8M tokens" is wildly unrealistic.
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)
They added the support by slopping a Direct2D emulation layer together.
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"?
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?
This is not a good release.
Don't support poorly made software. Use Gimp, Pinta, or Krita on Linux.