univers4craft/paint.software

paint.software is a free, open source image editor for Linux built to look and feel like Paint.NET, a popular Windows image editing program. It aims to give Linux users a familiar, lightweight alternative with layers, blend modes, selections, effects, and adjustments, without needing to run Windows software through a compatibility layer or a virtual machine. The editor includes layers with opacity and blend modes, a native file format that saves your full layer stack alongside the ability to export flat images as PNG or JPEG, a text tool with bold, italic, and underline options, and a standard set of drawing tools like a paintbrush, pencil, eraser, paint bucket, gradient tool, shape tools, a clone stamp, a color picker, and selection tools including a magic wand and lasso. It also offers a long list of adjustments such as brightness and contrast, hue and saturation, levels, and curves, along with more than thirty visual effects like blurs, sharpening, edge detection, and an oil paint style effect, each with a live preview so you can see the result before applying it. A plugin system lets developers add their own effects that show up in the same menu as the built-in ones, and a sample plugin ships with the program to show how that works. The interface is available in English and French, with light and dark themes, and it supports multiple open documents at once alongside rulers and an effectively unlimited canvas size. Installation options include a signed APT repository and downloadable .deb package for Debian-based systems like Ubuntu and Linux Mint, a portable AppImage that runs on any distribution without installation, a Flatpak package, or building it yourself from source using a C++17 compiler, CMake, and the Qt6 toolkit. The project is released under the MIT license and describes itself as an independent community project with no official connection to Paint.NET or its creators.