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Comment by Jdam | Hacker News Reader

This. Paint.NET is what I'm missing on my Mac so much.

It was my understanding that Pinta is essentially Paint.NET, and is available on Mac as well as Linux and Windows: https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/

Well, it's like comparing a go-kart to a sportscar. Pinta crashes on me a lot and has a fraction of the features.

When was the last time you tried it? I dismissed it for similar reasons when I first tried it, but then I tried it again about a year later and it was fine. Eventually I just manned up and learned how to use Gimp, though.

I've been in fact using it from its very beginning and I've been getting the latest version (currently 1.6) from a PPA. It's handy for the same things I use Paint.NET for - it just feels more clumsy, despite tryig to be similar. I appreciate both for being lightweight.

Paint.net has feature? I find it is just a simple quick raster editor with little to no features. What am I missing?

A ton of plugins... To be honest, I didn't check if Pinta supports those and I rarely use any in Paint.NET.

Being lightweight, quick to start with just the essential features is what I appreciate in both.

It's just that for my simple uses (stitching bitmaps together, resizing, getting color values, pixel-perfect alignment, working with multiple buffers, turning toolbars on/off, editing in layers) Pinta feels much clumsier than its big brother.

Paint.Net is good, indeed.

Let Krita be your new friend. https://krita.org/en/

I LOVE Krita BUT I would not say that Krita is NOT the same thing.

I use four graphics tools in Linux.

1) Inkscape (Vector paint program) I also use it on Windows though I have a Adobe license

2) Gimp (My go to raster image editor)

3) Krita my go to paint program and not really for raster image editing

4) Aftershot Pro - My raw image and editing tool for quick photo edits

Krita is more comparable to Corel Paint then to Photoshop or Gimp.

http://www.painterartist.com/en/product/painter/

Would be nice if I didn't need the half the KDE desktop for it.

What difference does that make? You don't have to run KDE (heck, I use it on windows). Yes its UI is a separate library from the specific program - any well-factored program will do the same, whether it exposes the separation or not.

> What difference does that make?

• It's more packages I need to download. Doubly annoying because 95% of the packages are just "thin wrapper around foo, because we're too hipster to use libraries directly like peasants".

• It installs system-wide services I have to disable/mask just so other programs don't mistakenly use them because they think I run KDE and they have to integrate into it.

• Oh wait, I can't disable some of these, because Krita itself needs them and now I need to figure out how to make them play nice with my desktop aaaaaarggghhhh

> It's more packages I need to download. Doubly annoying because 95% of the packages are just "thin wrapper around foo, because we're too hipster to use libraries directly like peasants".

"Number of packages" is not a very meaningful metric. The combined filesize isn't that large (not by the standards of an image editor anyway), and under any modern package manager installing a package with dependencies is no harder than installing one without.

> It installs system-wide services I have to disable/mask just so other programs don't mistakenly use them because they think I run KDE and they have to integrate into it.

Really? KDE tends to be a well-behaved crossplatform citizen IME (unlike Gnome) and not rely on anything system-wide. (There was some horribly ill-advised semantic nonsense in KDE 4, but I don't think it ever affected Krita).

I agree with you for point 2 & 3, I also hated installing KDE apps for this exact reason.

But I can't agree on the first one.

I have not checked what these exact thin wrappers are, but most of the time thin wrappers are really useful for testing and switching to another library without being tangled in the old one.

It pretty much follow the "D" (Dependency inversion principle) in the S.O.L.I.D. principles: "Depend upon Abstractions. Do not depend upon concretions.”.

Again, I have not checked the KDE libs you talk about, so I'm assuming this is what these wrappers are used for.

(Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_inversion_principle & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_(object-oriented_design) )

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon_(software) is one such example.

The kdelibs situation has improved a lot in the last couple of years. The team has worked hard to split out the frameworks and libraries from the desktop and apps themselves, so now you only need like 1/5 the KDE desktop.

It's worth taking another look if that was something that put you off in the past.

That is right there with RPM vs DEB debates and "RPM dependency hell."

75 MB appimage download then! https://krita.org/en/item/krita-3-0-released/

In the past I didn't like the fact that Paint.NET isn't available on Linux. After using editors like Krita, I realized I didn't miss Paint.NET as much as I missed an image editor that isn't GIMP.

I've used Paint.NET for years, and used GIMP on Linux platforms out of necessity. I wasn't aware of Krita until now, but it looks great. Thanks!

I know it's not free, but I think the $30 for Pixelmator is so worth it on Mac. I miss that one now on Windows. :)

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