I've been using paint.net for years now and it does have some pros.
- Sufficient even for mid-complexity art tasks
- Nice, simple interface
- Plenty of plugins
I don't mind the proprietary format -- since I'm usually just doing quick tasks in it, I'm either saving as jpg or png, or don't expect to need to open the pdn file at some later time or in other software.
However for anyone looking to start with something new, I'd really recommend using Krita or some other more recent program. Paint.net's available plugins are wildly disorganized, spread across at least one forum and hundreds of threads, often out of date or not working as intended, etc.
Great community and they deserve all the praise for maintaining free software for many years, but much like Gimp, it's just not the best free option available anymore.
The best part is it did it in a way that it’s still accessible to basic needs
Gimp on the other hand… only for power users. I recently tried using it for some quick edits (apt install gimp popped into my head first) What a nightmare.
Linux apps of old were the bare engine with no seat belts and cup holders, and often no steering wheel. Windows apps back in the day were often way better about easing users in.
If there is one thing about Paint.net that I really like, it is that is has separate, simple controls for manipulating a selection independently of whatever the selection is selecting. Like you can move the marching ants around super easy. Years ago I had a job that involved a lot of cropping + rescaling images and my workflow with paint.net was so much faster than anything else
I have tried all but pdn is the best software for quick editing. In the time it takes for Krita or GIMP to launch, I'm already halfway in pdn. I really miss it when using Linux.
For Linux there is Pinta, which is a very similar UI to pdn. It works well enough much of the time but I've found it way more unstable than pdn (and without the plugin ecosystem).
I'm not sure what it is on my machine(s), but I've found Pinta to be very unstable. It'll crash to desktop without warning in the middle of random operations. If it would just work reliably it's the paint app I want to use.
There have been issues with the packaging of the app. I can't remember precisely, but I do remember some crashes due to mismatches of some expected library version in Debian family. I'm using the version on Flathub which seems to work, and while I dislike some of the recent UI decisions like the ColorPicker is now worse (apparently enforced on them via GTK changes), I do still like Pinta.
Pinta actually uses an older version of the paint.net image manipulation functionality from when Paint.net was open source, with a rewritten UI (in gtk# if I recall correctly, compared to WPF for Paint.net). However, that new UI is significantly inferior to Paint.net's. One example - last time I tried it, the "marching arts" to highlight selections was sized in terms of pixels in the source image. It was always 1 source image pixel wide, rather than 1 screen pixel. This significantly hurt its usefulness for pixel art type situations.
It's also Windows only and one of the few things still holding me back from going full KDE. Krita is frankly overcomplicated for basic everyday stuff and Pinta is a decent clone with the same workflow and shortcuts, but still falls short in most aspects and is not very performant.
- Sufficient even for mid-complexity art tasks
- Nice, simple interface
- Plenty of plugins
I don't mind the proprietary format -- since I'm usually just doing quick tasks in it, I'm either saving as jpg or png, or don't expect to need to open the pdn file at some later time or in other software.
However for anyone looking to start with something new, I'd really recommend using Krita or some other more recent program. Paint.net's available plugins are wildly disorganized, spread across at least one forum and hundreds of threads, often out of date or not working as intended, etc.
Great community and they deserve all the praise for maintaining free software for many years, but much like Gimp, it's just not the best free option available anymore.