Paint.NET is a popular graphics editing program for Microsoft Windows. It’s easier to use than Adobe Photoshop/GIMP but far more powerful than MS Paint. The program is build on the .NET Framework, so that it can be ported to Linux thanks to Mono. Two years ago Miguel de Icazaannounced that he ported Paint.NET to Linux, but only now I can confirm that his port works.
There’s no official Ubuntu or Debian package for Paint Mono yet, so you have to compile Paint Mono by your own. You need a couple of packages to be able to do so. So please install the following packages.
$ sudo apt-get install mono-devel monodevelop mono-tools-gui mono-tools-devel subversion
Afters this you should be able to download the latest source via subversion, compile and install Paint Mono via…
$ svn co http://paint-mono.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src paint-mono
$ cd paint-mono
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
There won’t be a icon inside your application menu for Paint Mono, the only way to start the program is by executing the following command.
$ paintdotnet
On your desktop Paint Mono should now look like this.
To sum this up… Is it worth the work? Absolutely not, don’t think “hey, the screenshot looks great, i’ll give it a chance”… Paint Mono is VERY slow, even on a Athlon X2 with 3Ghz dualcore cpu it way to slow to be able to paint. Besides that it looks pretty ugly on your desktop, especially with other themes like Shiki Colors. You’ll have with text on white backgrounds inside the menubar. I also noticed a couple of crashes, so stay with The GIMP or Krita, Paint Mono is not ready for your Desktop.
(This is a copy of my blog Paint Mono… Paint.NET for Linux on Linux und Ich)
