Hey guys! I just wanted to share a proof of concept real quick. No hate at all to GIMP or Pinta, but I just really love Paint.net as I’ve been using it for over a decade. And since I completely switched over to Arch a year ago, that means the only way I can enjoy using Paint.net again is if I add all the missing Direct 2D implementations. How hard could it be? 😅
As you can see, it’s not perfect… or even usable, but it loads without crashing! And that’s good enough for me to call it quits tonight.
Awesome! Pinta is good but paint.net is great.
that’s a really nice desktop you have there. I legit can’t tell it’s not Windows 7 lol
Thanks! Its KDE
Yeah tbh I also like the design while I wouldnt use it XD
There’s Pinta for the Paint.net users.
Paint.net is genuinely the only software that I have missed since leaving Windows behind. Thanks for giving me some hope
It would be nice to have something as basic and fast as paint. I just want to fast load resize and text overlay in a couple clicks and call it done.
KolourPaint is very close to an exact clone of MS Paint from around Windows XP.
There are also xpaint and Pinta, which are somewhat different, but might satisfy your requirements too.
I just ran MS Paint (XP version) using wine. You just need to install mfc42 library and it runs great.
I use kolour paint on kde, there are a lot of other similar FOSS softwares around too.
Linux Mint has a program simply called “Drawing” that does exactly that. You can resize pictures, draw shapes, write text, paint and save as other formats. It’s a big buggy and unoptimized, but it’s cool. For simple things, it’s sometimes more convenient than GIMP.
If it works on Pop!, as most things seem to, it’s in.
Any changes on some information or links to replicate this? Paint.net is currently a berry big reason duo boot into windows
I got this working by modifying and compiling Wine from source. My approach was to read the crash logs and apply fixes to the missing DLL implementations as they popped up. Most of the required functions already exist in Wine, they just return “not implemented” errors.
The two main issues:
- Installation crashes - caused by incomplete code in a window animation DLL. This should be relatively straightforward to fix properly.
- Runtime crashes - caused by missing Direct2D implementations. These are more complex to implement.
What you see in my screenshot is a proof of concept. It loads successfully and basic interaction works, though it’s not fully functional yet. I’m planning to release my custom Wine branch this weekend so others can help.
Cudos to you! Doing good
