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Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux

forums.paint.net

11–20 of 191 posts

Re: Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux

#11
post #8

This is via Wine, so presumably it should also run on Macs now. Paint.net is the only thing I miss from my days on Windows machines, so super excited about this!

I also miss paint.net on Mac. Pinta gets pretty close though: https://www.pinta-project.com/

Re: Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux

#12
post #9

The full thread[0] about how it runs on Wine is quite interesting: > 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 l…

How can one claim clean room if developed by a model? “Don’t use stolen code, yo”?

Re: Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux

#17

Apparently the author got a surprising amount of backlash on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...

> Alright everyone, message received. I was not expecting this response, I honestly had no idea before I made the post

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.

Re: Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux

#18
post #16

Here is the source code of the last open source (MIT) release from 2008 Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux https://web.archive.org/web/20080000000000*/http://www.dotpd...

> Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux

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.

Re: Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux

#19
post #12
post #9

The full thread[0] about how it runs on Wine is quite interesting: > 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 l…

How can one claim clean room if developed by a model? “Don’t use stolen code, yo”?

I'm not the Paint.NET developer (just a happy user of that software), but to me the moral logic would go something like this:

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.

Re: Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux

#20

Apparently the author got a surprising amount of backlash on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...

> Alright everyone, message received. I was not expecting this response, I honestly had no idea before I made the post 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 almo…

>The source got deleted, what is the backlash even about?

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.

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