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.

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[–] [S] 56 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Immediately made cover art for Lutris because why not

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  • [–] 21 points 3 weeks ago (13 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 31 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (11 children)

    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.Forms namespace), 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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    I have no experience with MAUI, I only heard that it was cross-platform.

    Then what other toolkit has stable .NET bindings on both Linux and Windows? This might become relevant to me professionally in the near future.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Microsoft's definition of "cross-platform" generally means "Windows and mobile devices, maybe Macs"; MAUI supports Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Tizen, but not desktop Linux.

    Generally speaking, if you want a .Net UI that works on all desktop operating systems you'll want a third-party framework like Avalonia or Uno. Yes, that's extremely annoying but .Net is generally well-designed otherwise and they have to put that signature Microsoft touch somehwere.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Avalonia offers an unoffical Linux backend for MAUI and there are some other less-maintained backends. I have tried neither of them (I really should) but they might work.

    The nice thing about WPF, MAUI, Avalonia and Uno is that they are all extremely similar in concept to the point where you can sometimes just take an existing UI, change some namespaces and class names and get mostly what you want. (WinForms on the other hand is very different from all of them)

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    @rtxn @BananaTrifleViolin Nothing prevents you from using Window Forms implementation form mono

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    @rtxn there is net9 winforms port:github.com/DemonBigj781/X11For

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  • [–] 9 points 3 weeks ago

    Adding 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.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 9 points 3 weeks ago

    How is this a meme?

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago

    Excellent news 😃

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago

    Loved paint.net. miss paint.net. this is awesome news

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago

    Me who's been pinned on 2.1.2 since the abysmal GTK3 upgrade: You know what, I might just check that out!

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago

    @spicehoarder How About The License?

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  • [+] -21 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] [S] 17 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    That excerpt is extremely old, and if memory serves correctly, it *is * how they used to be branded...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP

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  • ...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.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

    That comparison is off. Paint.net is actually a program I like on Windows (which I only use at work), that I miss on Linux anywhere else because it is not like GIMP. GIMP might be the mega-super-duper tool for artists and photo-manipulators, but try to put an arrow on a screenshot pointing at something and write a text next to it. I get that done faster by importing the screenshot into Inkscape and re-export it to PNG, even if it f's up the original images' resolution.

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