Developer Rick Brewster announced on September 1st on the X platform the release of Paint.NET 5.2 Build 9739, which experimentally supports the Linux platform for the first time through Wine.
This Time, He Wrote a Replacement for Direct2D That Had Been Stuck for 12 Years
Brewster said the biggest obstacle during development was Direct2D—a 2D graphics API developed by Microsoft specifically for Windows. Paint.NET has long relied on it for interface and image rendering. Due to the incomplete native support of Direct2D in Wine, he decided not to wait any longer but instead develop an internal replacement solution, implementing the core graphics API functions required by the software.
He revealed that thanks to the assistance of the AI programming tool Claude Code, this Linux port took about three weeks, achieving more progress than all previous attempts combined over the past 12 years. However, Brewster also admitted that the current implementation still suffers from slow performance and frequent bugs, making it temporarily unstable for general users.
Public information shows that Paint.NET is a free raster image editor for Windows. It was originally a student project supported by Washington State University and Microsoft, with the goal of serving as an enhanced alternative to Windows "Paint." It later gradually evolved into a software between system drawing tools and Photoshop/GIMP.
