Pinta Usability Concerns

[xLeozero]

When I first came across Pinta I was amazed to see a clone of the exact software I was trying to run with native Linux support.

However after using it more, I have noticed quite a few drawbacks that make paint.net feel more natural. Here are the things I noticed & I'm curious if anyone else feels the same or what your thoughts on these criticism are:

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The tool bar is too spread out, the smaller PC first icons on Paint.net with them being closer is better for quickly switching between tools if you're not using hotkeys, at least makes "island tool menus" an option.

Scrolling to zoom is locked to the centre of the frame, it should be unlocked to view certain points. Also a button on the bottom task bar to recenter the image at 100% zoom to quickly get back to that.

The mouse wheel does nothing. In paint.net in pans up/down & if you hold shift while scrolling it pans left/right.

When using the area select tool, clicking off the canvas should remove the selected area, aka select everything like it does on paint.net. Instead it just selects a pinpoint off to the side, really intuitive behaviour. A single click should always just remove the selection area (so complete project selection.

Everything is just too big, margins on the side, buttons, the ruler. It feels too bubbly. It feels as if its almost designed for a phone or touch screen rather then as a desktop first application. Paint.net comes from an era when everything was mouse & keyboard optimized, this feels like a mix in between PC optimized & mobile optimized.

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These are just a few of the usability issues I noticed, but I'd say the most annoying is the toolbox covering the whole side view, it is the greatest usability disadvantage to Pinta. I'm sure if I used it longer I would learn by instinct where to click for what I need, but that doesn't change the fact its taking up more screen real-estate then it should & it takes too long for the eyes to scan the icons. At least a couple dozen millisecond mental delay vs regular paint.net.

Is this just me being hyper picky or do others feel the same way?

[Skif-off]

The mouse wheel does nothing. In paint.net in pans up/down & if you hold shift while scrolling it pans left/right.

Works fine for me: Xubuntu 24.04, Pinta from master.

[Qronikarz]

Everything is just too big, margins on the side, buttons, the ruler. It feels too bubbly. It feels as if its almost designed for a phone or touch screen rather then as a desktop first application. Paint.net comes from an era when everything was mouse & keyboard optimized, this feels like a mix in between PC optimized & mobile optimized.

Funny story, this is exactly what it was designed for. Well... not Pinta itself, but the toolkit that it uses - GTK4+Libadwaita. It's a controversial topic in linux world, but that combo of a toolkit is in fact designed to accommodate touchscreens better. It would be nice if Pinta offered Qt toolkit version, but you would need more developers for that.

Overall, Pinta is still the best Paint.net alternative for Linux since that's how this project started (a fork of open-source Paint.net), but it diverged from it quite a few versions ago.

You can maybe try finding Pinta 2.0 to see if it remedies some of your criticisms. It used older GTK3 which was more densely packed.

[xLeozero]

Thanks for the history & the backstory on the the UI frameworks. I've seen the terms GTK4 & Qt before & had no idea what they meant.

Essentially the take away I got was, if I care about a desktop first environment, always chose Qt or if unavailable GTK3.

[davepruitt]

I have so many usability issues with Pinta that I do not have with Paint.NET. Pinta's website claims that Pinta "just works", but I have found this to be anything but the case.

If I press the "escape" key on the keyboard, I expect whatever selection is currently draw to immediately be deselected. This does not happen.

Also, drawing a rectangle selection in Pinta is incredibly confusing. If I draw a rectangle selection, and then I click somewhere else on the canvas, it looks like the selection follows my click..... kind of???? I would actually expect it not to follow my click, but it does this weird thing:

I really cannot stand Pinta. It's so unintuitive to use, which is a shame because Paint.NET is incredibly intuitive to use.

[cameronwhite]

Please file bugs for issues like these (#1849 already exists for the Escape key)

[Zzooouhh]

I wonder if you're using the most recent version of Pinta or an older version from a repository? I know that multiple package repositories out there are still on Pinta 1.7.1.

In the meanwhile, for Pinta 1.7.1 especially, please consider looking into my Pinta-classic fork, which corrects the rectangle selection handles, Escape (or Enter) key to deselect, and dozens of other small cumulative tweaks like these: #2147