Paint.NET 5.2 Alpha (build 9739) contains extremely experimental support for WINE (which means Linux).

Some of you may be happy to hear this. Some may be not. It may make for some interesting debate, or something like it.

ETA:

This was written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible and would NEVER have happened.

Quick Important Side Note: If you don’t like AI, if you hate AI, if you refuse to run any software that AI touches, if your favorite pejorative is now “slop” … fine. Whatever. I’m not going to try and convince you otherwise. You’re entitled to your own opinion, I don’t care. But keep that talk out of here. You don’t have to use this. It’s clearly not for you.

Most of this code is, as they say, “vibe coded.” By that I mean that it has not been thoroughly reviewed, it’s more “trust me bro” style. I cannot possibly review 180,000 lines of code, it’s just way way way too much. For reference, the rest of Paint.NET is about 700,000 lines of code and I’ve been working on it for over 20 years. I did thoroughly review any code that had to be changed or added elsewhere in the Paint.NET code base (refactoring and integration points, etc.). Over time I do hope that more of this code will be vetted by real humans and also by more advanced AI models.

At times, Claude was working with the fury of 10 freshly unshackled Einstein genius-level 10x coders. And other times … well, not so much. I had to babysit Claude quite a bit to make sure it did resource management correctly (for awhile it just wasn’t doing the COM equivalent of AddRef() for reference counted objects, oops). I had to slap it a few times when I found some really bad design or architecture decisions. And I was also impressed at some rather clever and tireless reverse engineering work it did to figure out all the formulas needed for implementing Direct2D’s built-in effects library. It never had to decompile/disassemble d2d1.dll, it figured it all out “clean room” style*. And it never got tired, it never got bored, and it never got annoyed when I changed my mind 10 times in a row.

Day and night, it just kept coding, and coding, and coding … writing tests, comparing rendering output to the real Direct2D, making and updating hypotheses and formulas and shaders and error handling and everything until it got things just right …

… And then it worked. It actually booted up. In WINE. Claude got this working in about 3 weeks. This involved a lot of Fable, a lot of Opus, and even some Sonnet (those are the 3 models in reverse order of intelligence/complexity). I finally managed to boot up Paint.NET in .NET 10 win-x64, in WINE, on Ubuntu, in WSL 2, on Windows 11. And then later that day some folks on Discord got it running on real Linux systems. There’s been more work since then in order to further refine and fix up the code, but now it’s at least kinda-sorta ready for others to try out.

It is NOT “production ready.” I wouldn’t even call it “alpha quality”. It “doesn’t not” work.